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THE WORLD WITHIN 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE 
WORLD WITHIN 



BY 



RUFUS M. TONES, M.A., Litt.D. 

Author o/*'The Inner Life," etc. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1918 

AU rights reserved 






COPTBIGHT. 1918 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Fublished. September, 1918 



OCT -I im 



©Gi.A50600i 



? PREFACE 

r^_ Some of the sections included in the chapters 

^ of this volume have already appeared as articles 

C;J either in the London Friend or in the Homiletic 

Review. The editors of these two periodicals 

have kindly given permission for the publication 

of such articles in the present book. 



INTRODUCTION 

There is a fine passage in one of Keats's Let- 
ters in which the poet says that our world is cre- 
ated primarily as a place for making souls ■ — in 
his phrase it is " a vale of soul-making." 

We are just now so absorbed with external tasks 
and so occupied with the solution of problems in 
our outside world that most of us hardly have time 
to consider whether we have any souls or not. 
We allow that question to await its turn for an 
answer. But there are some questions — and this 
is precisely one of them — which cannot be post- 
poned while outer issues are being settled. In 
fact all outer issues are intricately tied up with 
just this inner one. It turns out to be forever 
true that the inner aspect which we call morale is 
the main factor even in contests which are sup- 
posed to be only external. Those impalpable 
things which we name faith and vision and spirit 
and nerve are greater elements in the determina- 
tion even of outside victories than are miraculous 
long-distance guns. The conviction that our fun- 



vi INTRODUCTION 

damental aims are righteous is an unspeakable 
asset. Moreover, it appears as clearly evident 
now as it was two thousand years ago in Syria that 
it is of no use or profit to win the whole world if 
the inner life and self-respect are lost in the proc- 
ess; that houses and lands, territory and spheres 
of influence, are a poor substitute for that intangi- 
ble thing which we call the souL 

Some day, near or remote, this war will be over. 
These unparalleled armies will demobilize and 
these multitudes of young men who have been liv- 
ing under most unwonted human conditions and 
have been facing death every day in appalling 
shapes will return to the pursuits which they have 
intermitted for this vast business of Armageddon. 
The new tasks of reorganization, rehabilitation 
and reconstruction awaiting them and us will be 
fully as unparalleled as the modes and magnitude 
of the warfare have been. And beyond any ques- 
tion the most important preparation for this im- 
mense work of rebuilding the wrecked and shat- 
tered world will be the clarification and fortifica- 
tion of the soul. There will be, no doubt, enor- 
mous economic issues to be settled. We shall be 
confronted with a wholly novel group of political 
problems. It will be a world charged with un- 
usual dynamic social aspirations which must be 



INTRODUCTION vii 

dealt with. But still deeper than all other issues 
will be the issues of the soul. 

We cannot build this new world of ours out of 
material stuff alone. It will not be a matter 
solely of iron and coal and foodstuffs. It will, as 
always, be a matter of creative faith, of spiritual 
vision — in a word, the ultimate issue will turn 
upon the quality and character of the soul of those 
of us who are to do the building. We must be 
on our guard against low and miserable material 
aims which would put the holiest hopes of our age 
again in imminent peril. We must restore trust 
and confidence in a living God who is not off be- 
yond and above the storm and stress of life, but 
in the very pulse and flow of it all, and whose 
will for a good world is the deepest reality of our 
universe. We shall certainly care less than we 
once did for non-essentials in religion, for the ex- 
ternal counters, for the time-worn survivals of 
bitter controversies, but we shall, if we are wise, 
care more than ever for the central realities by 
which men live. St. Augustine was right when he 
said: '' My life shall now be a real life, being 
wholly full of Thee." Variations in external 
matters will become — are .already becoming — 
unimportant and negligible. The things which 
form and fashion the soul and set it on '^ the path 



viii ' INTRODUCTION 

to that which is Best " will be the abiding things 
and the only ones of any permanent value for vital 
religion. 

We do not want a religion which meets the 
needs of experts alone and moves in a region 
beyond the reach of common men and women 
who have no taste for the intricacies of theology. 
If religion is, as I profoundly believe, the essen- 
tial way to the full realization of life, we, who 
claim to know about it, ought to interpret it so 
that its meaning stands out plain and clear to those 
who most need it to live by. I have always be- 
lieved and maintained that the apparent lack of 
popular interest in it is largely due to the awk- 
ward and blundering way in which it has been 
presented to the mind and heart of those who all 
the time carry deep within themselves inner hun- 
gers and thirsts which nothing but God can sat- 
isfy. I do not want to write or print a line which 
does not at least bear the mark and seal of real- 
ity — and which will not make some genuine fact 
of life more plain and sure. 

The struggle for a conquering Inner faith has 
In these strenuous days been laid upon us all. 
The easy, inherited, second-hand faith will not 
do for any of us now. We cannot stand the stern 
issues of life and death with any feeble, formal 



INTRODUCTION ix 

creed. We demand something real enough and 
deep enough to answer the human cry of our soul 
to-day. We need to be assured that we do not 
in the last resort fall back on the play of mole- 
cules but that underneath us are everlasting Arms. 
We want to know not only that there is law and 
order but that a genuine Heart of Love touches 
our heart and brings us calm and confidence. 

Robert Louis Stevenson has somewhere told of ^ 
an experience that happened once to his grand- 
father. He was on a vessel that was caught by a 
terrific storm and was carried irresistibly toward 
a rocky shore where complete destruction was im- 
minent. When the storm and danger were at 
the height he crept up on deck to look around and 
face the worst. He saw the pilot lashed to the 
wheel, with all his might and nerve holding the 
vessel off the rocks and steering it inch by inch 
into safer water. While he stood watching, the 
pilot looked up at him and smiled. It was little 
enough but it completely reassured him. He went 
back to his room below with new confidence, say- 
ing to himself, ''We shall come through; I saw 
the pilot smile ! " If we could only in some way 
catch sight of a smile on the face of the great 
Pilot in this strange rough sea in which we are 
sailing, we, too, could do our work and carry our 



X INTRODUCTION 

burdens with confidence, perhaps with joy. I wish 
this little book might help some readers to be con- 
vinced that even in the dark and the storm there is 
a smile of hope and victory on the Pilot's face and 
that He is saying as the great Galilean said : " Be 
of good cheer, I am winning the victory over the 
world.'' 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction .......... v 

CHAPTER I 

The Deeper Universe i 

I Where Love Breaks Through . • . . i 

II Unseen and Intangible Realities .... 6 

III The World We Form Within .... 12 



CHAPTER II 
The Way of Faith and Love . . 
I The Central Act of Religion . 
II Faith as a Way of Life . 

III A Religion Which Does Things 

IV The Gospel of God With Us 



18 
18 
22 
27 
32 



CHAPTER III 

The Way of Dedication 37 

I Inner Compulsion 37 

II The All for the All 41 

III Habakkukeans 45 

IV Consecration to Service 50 

V Poured Out .58 

CHAPTER IV 

The Things By Which We Live 64 

I The Plumb-Line 64 

II The Fact of Must 71 

III WTiere Arguments Fail 75 

IV The Meaning of Obligation 81 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER V PAGE 

The Great Venture 88 

I Concerning Immortality 88 

II The Miracle Again 94 

CHAPTER VI 

The Soul's Converse 99 

I Prayer as an Energy of Life 99 

II Prayer and Reflection 1 15 

CHAPTER VII 

Christ's Inner Way to the Kingdom . . .124 

I ''From Above" 124 

II Like Little Children 131 

III The Inner Issue in Gethsemane . . . .136 

CHAPTER VIII 

Jesus Christ and the Inner Life .... 143 

I In the Synoptic Gospels .143 

II In the Writings of St. Paul 158 

III In the Writings of St. John 164 



THE WORLD WITHIN 

CHAPTER I 
THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 



WHERE LOVE BREAKS THROUGH 

We do well to make strenuous exertions to meet 
the threatening food-famine and to cultivate ef- 
ficiently all the acres that are available for increas- 
ing the food-supply of the world. But there is 
another kind of famine which is threatening and 
ominous, and which has not yet received anything 
like adequate attention. I mean the spiritual 
famine of our stricken world. Multitudes of men 
are daily facing danger and death. Vast numbers 
are weighted with loss, suffering and agony. The 
deeper problems of life rest heavily upon all of 
us. The old religious phrases are inadequate. 
Human hearts everywhere are longing for fresh 
and vital assurance that in this time of the world's 
greatest spiritual need the everlasting Arms of 
divine love are underneath us, and that one like 



2 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 

unto the Son of Man is walking with us in the 
midst of the fire. Where shall we look for this 
assurance? 

We know much more about the universe than 
the ancient world knew, but the more we know 
about it the harder it becomes for our spirits to 
accept the visible universe as the ultimate and final 
reality. The cold and pitiless forces of nature are 
not less cold and pitiless when we succeed in dis- 
covering their laws and habits. One comes back 
from his study of the march of suns, and planets, 
and the spiral movements of world-making nebulae 
with very little to comfort the longings of the 
heart. He sees that these curves are all irrev- 
ocable and inevitable and that each event unfolds 
out of the one which preceded. It is a wonderful 
and amazing system, but it offers no tenderness, 
no love, no balm for the wounds of the spirit. It 
rolls mercilessly on, and he may be thankful if its 
wheels do not ride over him — the midget of an 
hour, riding on one of the flying globes of this 
mechanical system. 

It is useless to expect tenderness and love and 
balm in a system of mechanical forces. That kind 
of world can reveal gravitation and electricity, 
attraction and repulsion; it can show us matter 
moving under law; it can exhibit the transforma- 



Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 3 

tion of one form of energy into some other form; 
but from the nature of the case it cannot manifest a 
heart of tenderness or a spirit of love. Those 
traits belong only to a person, and a mechanical 
system can never reveal a person. Physics and 
chemistry, geology and astronomy do discover a 
revelation of God, but it is necessarily a revelation 
limited to the possibilities of their field. The test- 
tube and the air-pump help to demonstrate the fact 
that the universe is a realm of purpose, of order, 
and of inexhaustible energy, but they must not be 
expected to show us a divine face or a heart of 
love. God puts no more of himself into chemistry 
or physics or astronomy than chemistry or physics 
or astronomy will hold ! 

Even this external universe with its law and 
order, its forces and energies, can not be as cold 
and pitiless as it appears when it is mistakenly 
sundered and cut away from the deeper and more 
spiritual reality working endlessly through it and 
forever preparing for a higher stage to succeed 
and transcend a lower stage. Physical nature is 
always more than the bare mechanical fragment 
with which the descriptive sciences deal. '' That 
is not first which is spiritual, but that which is 
natural; and afterward that which is spiritual." 
Our life can not be completely sundered from the 



4 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 

physical universe. We are in some way organic 
with it and of it, and the God we seek can show 
at least some aspects of himself through it. He 
uses it steadily toward spiritual ends, though under 
obvious limits. It is a realm of mighty moral 
discipline and, fragment though it is by itself, 
it points all serious souls to the larger whole, 
the completer reality which supplements and ful- 
fills it. 

If the universe is deeper than physics and 
astronomy can reveal, if there is some greater 
reality than can be expressed in terms of energy 
and law, how could this deeper reality reveal 
itself? Where could the veil be lifted? Such a 
revelation could be made to humanity only 
through a person. Mountain peaks and stars can 
not embody love and sympathy — they can em- 
body only energy. Love and sympathy, tender- 
ness and patience, forgiveness and grace are traits 
of character, attitudes of a personal spirit. If 
they are ever to be revealed, they must be revealed 
in the life of a person. 

Now, once there was a Person who felt that 
his life was a genuine exhibition of the divine in 
the human, the eternal in the midst of time. He 
lived and died in the consciousness that through 
his life he was showing God to men ; that his love 



Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE S 

was a revelation of the real nature and character 
of God; that his sympathy for the weary, heavy- 
laden, sin-distressed, heart-hungry people of the 
earth was a true unveiling of the heart of the uni- 
verse; that his suffering over sin, his grace and 
patience made the Father's character visible and 
vocal in the world. He felt this, and consecrated 
his life to this deeper revelation of God. Some 
have doubted and some have been perplexed, but 
there have always been some — and It is a grow- 
ing number — who profoundly believe that here 
in him is the personal character of God revealed to 
us. However leaden and pitiless the march of the 
universe may be at other points, at this one point, 
at least, love and tenderness break through and 
enwrap us. This God who is unveiled in Christ is 
the God our world needs to-day. Not a God of 
abstract metaphysics, not a God apart in solitary 
bliss and perfection, but the God and Father of 
Jesus Christ, revealing himself to us in the closest 
intimacy of fellowship with us, and suffering like 
ourselves in the travail and tragedy of the world's 
suffering — •*' A God who lives in the perpetual giv- 
ing of himself." The Jesus whom Peter con- 
fessed and Mary loved can become the Christ of 
the world, and through him can come afresh to us 
the God whom our chemistry and astronomy were 



6 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 

too limited to reveal — we can see him in the face 
of Jesus Christ. 

II 

UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE REALITIES 
*^ That which is not brings to naught that which is.*' 

St. Paul's saying is not quite a paradox. It is 
rather a vivid and forceful way of saying what 
he often says, namely, that unseen and intangible 
realities build and shape the things we see. In- 
discernibles are mighty factors. An invisible 
world is behind and within the visible one. We 
recognize this truth now in a multitude of ways. 
In the fine peroration of his great message on 
*' The Leadership of Educated Men " — given at 
Brown University in 1882 — George William 
Curtis very impressively referred to the invisible 
force of gravitation which holds the world to- 
gether and controls all its movements. He said : 

" In the cloudless midsummer sky serenely shines the 
moon, while the tumultuous ocean rolls and murmurs 
beneath, the type of illimitable and unbridled power; but 
resistlessly marshaled by celestial laws all the wild waters, 
heaving from pole to pole, rise and recede obedient to 
that mild queen of heaven." 

We have slowly come to realize, as science has 
piled up its inferences and conclusions, that our 



Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 7 

visible world is only a fragment of a larger uni- 
verse and swims in a vast invisible world which 
has no known or conceivable bounds. Out of this 
inexhaustible sea of energy come the forces which 
build our visible world — forces which we name 
and use but do not understand. Gravitation, co- 
hesion, attraction, magnetism, electricity, molecu- 
lar energy, ether-waves are a few of the words 
which stand for mighty forces. We say the 
words and look wise, as though our finger were 
on a secret. We know, however, no more about 
the real nature of these forces which build our 
world than Aladdin knew about the jinnee that 
reared his palace when he rubbed his lamp. We 
know little more than that the visible comes out of 
the invisible, and that we can learn how these in- 
visible forces work and how to direct them for our 
practical ends. 

Everywhere and always the invisible is the 
builder of the visible. Michelangelo saw the 
dome of St. Peter's in the viewless realm of his 
own soul before he raised it into visible beauty 
above the groined arches of the cathedral. Every 
creation of art is an instance of the same truth. 
The form of beauty which comes forth into visible 
shape for the many to see and admire has first 
been an inner possession, growing into perfection 



8 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 

in the spaceless soul of the creator, where only 
one could see it. 

Plotinus used to hold that it is much truer to say 
that the body is in the soul than that the soul is in 
the body. And strange as it may sound, there is 
much to be said for this view of the ancient Greek 
philosopher. There are many good evidences to 
prove that some invisible reality — which we may 
just as well call soul as anything else, at least until 
we get a word that means more — that some in- 
visible reality builds and vivifies and directs this 
visible, corporeal bulk of ours. There is, for ex- 
ample, a tiny speech-center in the left hemisphere 
of the human brain, so complicated that all the 
telegraphic instruments in the United States, com- 
bined and worked from one central key, would 
make a very simple instrument compared with it. 
When a baby arrives here on his hazardous ven- 
ture his speech-center is not yet organized. Even 
if he knew all the wonders of the world he has left 
behind he could tell nothing about it -. — any more 
than Beethoven could have rendered a symphony 
without musical instruments. It looks as though 
the expanding mind of the child slowly organized 
and builded this marvelous center, which was only 
fleshy pulp before the organization was wrought 



Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 9 

out in it. There is, at any rate, no way to account 
in terms of matter for the transcendent meanings 
which burst into consciousness at the sound of 
words, nor for the way in which conscious effort 
and attentive purpose build the little bridges be- 
tween the cells of the brain and make of it an 
instrument for the spirit. 

We are, once more, all familiar with the way 
an invisible ideal holds and controls and dominates 
and constructs a life. It is one of the most 
notable features of our strange human experience. 
That which is not yet — for an ideal plainly is 
what ought to be but is not — works like a mighty 
energy. It upholds the spirit in hours of defeat. 
It makes one oblivious to pain. It conquers all 
opposition. It carries the will, contrary to all 
laws of mechanics, along the line of greatest resist- 
ance. It turns obstacles and hindrances into 
chariots of victory. It does the impossible. In 
PauPs great words, '^ the things which are not 
bring to naught the things which are ! " What 
cannon of unwonted caliber, pounding at the 
battle-lines of men, can not do, the impalpable 
ideas and ideals of the common people may after 
all accomplish. Dreams and visions and hopes 
are not so empty and useless as they often seem. 



lo THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 

Suddenly they find a potent voice, they grow 
mighty, they gather volume, and they do what 
cannon could not do. 

^* One man with a dream, at pleasure 
Shall go forth and conquer a crown ; 

And three with a new song's measure 
Can trample a kingdom down. 

** We, in the ages lying 

In the buried past of the earth, 
Built Nineveh with our sighing 

And Babel itself with our mirth; 

" And overthrew them with prophesying 
To the old of the new world's worth ; 

For each age is a dream that is dying 
Or one that is coming to birth." ^ 

The religious books of ancient Persia say that 
when the soul of a good man arrives at the river 
of death a beautiful, shining, radiant figure meets 
it and says to it: ''I am your true self, your best 
self, your real self. I am the image of your 
ideals, your strivings, your resolves, your deter- 
mined purposes. I am you. Henceforth we 
merge together into one harmonious life." The 
parable is a genuine one. We are forever what 
our ideals make us. 

1 The Dreamers by Arthur WilHam O'Shaughnessy. 



Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE ii 

But deeper and surer than all other invisible 
realities is that divine Spirit, not seen, but felt, 
who is the ground of our real being, the source of 
our longings, the inspirer of our larger hopes, the 
inner energy by which we live. Some persons 
think he must be dead or asleep or on a journey. 
They see such stalking evils, such collapses of 
civilization, such ugly shadows over the fair 
world, that they cannot hold their thin clew of 
faith any longer. It has snapped and left them 
standing alone in their dark cave. But he is 
there all the same, though they see him not nor 
know him. He does not vanish in the dark or 
in the storm. There is much love working still in 
these hard, dark days. Grace abounds, often un- 
suspected, even though sin seems so potent. 
Courage and heroism never broke through and 
showed their greatness more clearly than now. 
Sacrifice, which is woven in the same warp with 
love, is moving like a radiant light everywhere 
through the storm. Faith in something still holds 
men and women to their hard tasks of endurance. 
All that Christ was and is still attracts the soul 
that sees it. If an eclipse dims or veils the sight 
of him for the moment, we may be sure that this 
warm, healing Sun of our life has not set. He 
is still there, and some of us continue to feel our 



12 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 

hearts burn with his presence, which is as indu- 
bitable a reality as is the rock-ribbed earth upon 
which we tread. What he needs is better organs 
to reveal himself through, richer, truer, holier 
lives to show his love through, more finely organ- 
ized personalities for his grace to break through 
into the world. He cannot do his work without 
us. He cannot preach without our lips, comfort 
without our help, heal without our hands, carry 
the truth without our feet, remove the shadow 
without our faith and effort. The invisible works 
through the visible, the unseen and eternal oper- 
ates through little instruments like us! 



Ill 

THE WORLD WE FORM WITHIN 

We have had many illustrations in these sol- 
emn months of the momentous character of re- 
sponsible decisions. Many lives hang upon one 
man's judgment concerning a course of action, 
and even the fate of a nation is involved in the 
conclusion to which a single individual arrives. 
If the responsible man blunders, dire consequences 
follow; if he is wise, large advantages accrue. 
National disasters are generally no accidents. 



Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 13 

7. ^ 
They attach to inadequate planning or to ineffi- 
cient management of affairs. 

What is true of the large outer world is true 
also — inevitably true — in the smaller inner 
world which the schoolmen used to call the micro- 
cosm, that is, in the soul of man. Here also a 
person blunders at his peril. Here, too, conse- 
quences attach to decisions and deeds, and the 
quality of the reaping is determined by the char- 
acter of the sowing. This is a profound and 
fundamental feature of Christ's teaching. Al- 
ways and everywhere in his message the beyond is 
within, destiny is bound up with inner attitudes, 
with heart and mind and will. The secret of 
heaven and hell has not yet been fully explored. 
We have added little, in these later years of exces- 
sive question-asking, to our scanty knowledge of 
the regions beyond the margin of this life. '^ We 
should listen,'' as a wise man has told us, " on our 
knees to any one who by stricter obedience had 
brought his thoughts into parallelism with celes- 
tial currents and could hint to human ears the 
scenery and circumstances of the newly parted 
soul." 

But while our ignorance about the Great Be- 
yond is still as vast as that of Europe was about 
the western hemisphere before Columbus sailed 



14 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 

in the Pinta, we have been making steady prog- 
ress in our explorations of this inner world of 
ours — this microcosm. We know much about 
that viewless realm we call the soul. And the 
mor^^ we know about it the more wonderful do 
the words of Christ appear concerning this strange 
world within. John was surely right when he 
said, '' He knew what was in man! " 

One of the most fruitful of all our modern dis- 
coveries is that which for the want of a better 
term we call the '' subconscious," the submerged 
life below the threshold of consciousness. Some 
wild things have been said and written about this 
inside underworld, and the abnormal phenomena 
of the subliminal have perhaps come too much to 
the front, but the fact remains that the normal 
processes of the world below the threshold are 
as important for the microcosm as the battlefields 
of Europe are for the great world. It is in here 
that destiny is settled and the hereafter is built. 

We all begin life with certain instinctive func- 
tions which are admirably adapted to ends. 
These instincts carry the tiny individual unerringly 
forward. They build his future and make his 
wider career possible. How he got them and 
came by them he never asks. They are so much 
a part of himself that he never thinks to investi- 



Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 15 

gate the mystery. It turns out, however, that 
they are the inherited deposit of racial experience 
and habit, the contribution of practical wisdom 
which the immemorial past makes to the present. 
The slow gains of the ages are woven into the 
fiber of the newcomer and he pushes safely out 
for his venturous voyage on the accumulated in- 
heritance which was piled up before he arrived. 

Not less momentous and important are the ac- 
cumulations of his own growing emotions and 
thoughts and decisions. He is forever weaving, 
for better or for worse, the indestructible stuff 
of his inner subconscious life, which, at a later 
time, without any thought about it on his part, 
will steer and direct him as certainly as his in- 
herited instincts did in the baby stage. Every 
effort of will, every struggle of attention, every 
battle with temptation leaves its slender trace in 
the structure of the subconscious world which he 
is building, and it will be heard from again in 
some day of crisis or In some emergency of action. 
Nothing Is lost, nothing is uncounted, nothing is 
negligible. The tiny becomes big with impor- 
tance and the Indlscernibly little grows Into the 
Immense. Every feat of skill Is the product of 
patient practice, every case of unerring judgment 
has behind it a multitude of careful decisions. 



i6 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 

every revelation of grace in manner or disposi- 
tion is the slow fruit of pains and effort. The 
saint is no accidental mutation. Moral dexterity 
of soul and beauty of character are the result of 
human effort and of cooperation with God, as 
surely as physical health is the result of corre- 
spondence with the conditions of life. 

An ancient psalmist prayed for truth in his in- 
ward parts. It is a beautiful aspiration. But the 
way to get truth in the inward parts is to practice 
truth-telling as an unvarying habit. If one tells 
the truth and thinks the truth yesterday, to-day, 
and to-morrow, hates falsehood, abhors lying, and 
sincerely conforms to reality — he need not worry 
about the outcome. Truth is thus woven into 
the structure of the soul. The subconscious life is 
builded toward truth-telling and truth-living, and 
the inward self inclines to truth as streams flow 
to the sea. It is no accident that at last when 
Christ's servants see his face his name shall be 
on their foreheads. There is no caprice about 
that; for, after all, the heavenly life is the life 
formed by the transformation of our poor, feeble, 
limited, imperfect, sin-defiled selves into some- 
thing approaching a likeness of that holy, perfect 
life of his. How it comes we cannot altogether 
tell. There are mystery and miracle in it. But 



Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 17 

it does not " come " without our cooperation. It 
is not thrust upon us without our choice and de- 
cision. Here again .the weaving of the character 
and the writing of the name on the forehead are 
the result of saying '' Yes " to God and of patient 
conformity to eternal laws of life. 



CHAPTER II 
THE WAY OF FAITH AND LOVE 

I 

THE CENTRAL ACT OF RELIGION 

Religion is too rich and complex to be reduced 
to any one act or attitude or aspect of life. In 
so far as our religion is real and genuine, it will 
touch, heighten, and transform every feature of 
our lives, and, if that is so, we must not expect 
that we can pick out one feature and say here or 
nowhere the consummate blossom of religion is to 
be seen. But there is one act of life which does 
bring us in a special and peculiar way into the 
holy of holies of religion — a central act without 
which any person's religion will always remain 
dwarfed and unfulfilled. This central act is wor- 
ship. By worship I mean the act of rising to a 
personal, experimental consciousness of the real 
presence of God which floods the soul with joy 
and bathes the whole inward spirit with refresh- 
ing streams of life. Never to have felt that, 

i8 



Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 19 

never to have opened the life to these incoming 
divine tides, never to have experienced the joy of 
personal fellowship with God, is surely to have 
missed the richest privilege and the highest beati- 
tude of religion. Almost all of our modern 
forms of Christianity make too little of this cen- 
tral act, and, with some truth, it has been called 
'' the lost art of worship." The main reason for 
the decline of worship is the excessive desire, so 
common to-day, to have something always happen- 
ing or, as we often say, to have something *' do- 
ing." Hush, waiting, meditation, concentration 
of spirit, are just the reverse of our busy, driving, 
modern temper. The person who meditates, we 
are apt to think, will lose an opportunity to do 
something; while he muses, the procession will go 
on and leave him behind. We hear all the time 
of the vast human tasks that are to be done; we 
are crowded with practical problems, and some 
of us are ready to identify religion with service; 
we would like to turn the church into a soup- 
house, or at least into an institution for minister- 
ing to the wants of the neighborhood. 

Another tendency into which we easily fall is 
that of making religion consist of words, words, 
words. Talking about God, expounding the ex- 
periences of them of old time, saying apt and 



20 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 

lovely things about religion, occupy us much when 
we come together, and quite rightly so. But to 
what purpose do we '' talk about God " if none 
of us can pause in our inward rush and find him, 
actually meet with him and enter into the joy 
of the Lord? What have we gained by recount- 
ing the *' experiences " of past ages if nobody now 
is to have similar experiences? ] It is melancholy 
to hear of Bethels in the dim, far past if we are 
to conclude that that ladder between the soul and 
God has been pulled up, or pulled down, and that 
direct divine intercourse has ceased. The apt and 
lovely words about religion have place and mean- 
ing only if they create in us the passion and the 
positive intention to go ourselves on the spiritual 
pilgrimage, the goal of which is this holy of holies, 
where words about God fall away, since we have 
entered into the joy of his real presence. 

In the right place and in the proper degree we 
may well consider what are the great truths of 
our religion, what are the structural ideas of our 
faith, and it is essential that we should work out, 
and work out intelligently, the ways and means, 
the plans and methods, of social service — the 
practical application of our spiritual insight to the 
society of our time — but in all these matters do. 
not let us make the fatal mistake of supposing that 



Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 21 

religion is primarily either words or service. Re- 
ligion is primarily, and at heart, the personal 
meeting of the soul with God. If that experience 
ceases in the world, religion, in its first intention, 
is doomed. We may still have ideas about the 
God whom men once knew intimately, and we may 
still continue to work for human betterment, but 
there can be living religion only so long as the 
soul of man is capable of experiencing the fresh 
bubbling of the living water within and can know 
for himself that a heart of eternal love beats in 
the central deeps of the universe within his reach. 

To give up the cultivation of worship, then, 
means in the long run the loss of the central thing 
in religion ; it involves the surrender of the price- 
less jewel of the soul. In its stead we may per- 
fect many other things ; we may make our form of 
divine service, as we call it, very artistic and very 
popular; we may speak with the tongues of men 
and sing with the tongues almost of angels, but if 
we lose the power to discover and appreciate the 
real presence of God and if we miss the supreme 
joy of feeling ourselves environed by the Spirit 
of the living and present God, we have made a bad 
exchange and have dropped from a higher to a 
lower type of religion. 

There is no doubt that, as with all the su- 



22 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 

premely great things, the act of worship calls for 
intense devotion, for unusual concentration, for 
long-continued spiritual preparation. If it is, as 
I believe, the very goal and pinnacle of religion — 
the flowering of the tree of life — then we must 
not expect that it will cost nothing or that it will 
be reached along lines of least resistance. Reli- 
gion has always demanded, for its best things, the 
absolute price. There is no finding without los- 
ing; there is no getting without giving; there is 
no living without dying. For a few dollars we 
can get a book on religion; for a few more dollars 
we can get some one to talk to us about the things 
of religion; but what we cannot get for dollars, 
however high we heap them, is this experience 
which is the heart of religion, this experience of 
God, this practice of -the divine presence, this joy 
of being ourselves in the holy of holies. 

II 

FAITH AS A WAY OF LIFE 

Some persons think of faith as a mark of weak- 
ness. To their minds it is a form, or relic, of 
superstition — a diet of "milk" to be discarded 
for the '' strong meat " of knowledge as soon as 
one is full-grown. There are many grown-up 



Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 23 

boys and girls who pride themselves on having 
outgrown the need of this old-fashioned article. 
'* When I was a child," they grandly say, '' I 
thought as a child, but when I reached the age of 
manhood I put away childish things. I mean to 
accept nothing now which I cannot know." 

That general program, however, turns out to be 
very absurd. It will not work for a minute. In- 
stead of bringing emancipation, it makes life a 
poor rope of sand, with no power whatever to it. 
A little thought and insight would show this per- 
son, who is so eager to graduate from his child- 
hood stage, that all his knowledge and all his 
activities are penetrated through and through 
with faith. He cannot move a step without it ; he 
cannot even start to think without it. He must 
trust the evidence of his senses. He must have 
faith that there is a world which corresponds to 
his impressions of sight and touch, of taste and 
smell. He must assume and believe that what is 
outside and beyond his mind fits what is inside. 
Who can ever '' prove " to him that the world 
actually is precisely the way it looks? Nobody. 
That is a mighty venture of faith which we all 
must make. We must live in the belief that the 
world outside the mind and inside the mind make 
together one whole and coherent world. 



24 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 

Science, too, involves faith at every point of its 
structure. All the tools, the instruments, the ma- 
chinery of science must be taken as a venture of 
faith. The greatest tool it uses is the principle of 
cause — everything in the universe must have a 
cause and must be explained by its cause. But 
that universal principle of science never has been 
" proved," and, from the nature of the case, never 
can be '' proved." It is assumed as a working 
principle and used on a venture of faith. There 
is no doubt that it works very well, but it is never- 
theless faith applied to science. The '' laws " of 
the universe which science spells out are never seen 
with the eye or touched with the hand. They are 
not material '^ things." They are as invisible and 
intangible as God himself is. They are in the 
sphere of faith rather than in the sphere of knowl- 
edge. We have no way of '* knowing " that the 
laws of nature will always remain uniform, will 
always work as they do now, will always be re- 
liable and trustworthy. No amount of experi- 
ence could ever ** prove " that. We make the 
great venture of faith that it is so and act upon it 
and It works well, and on the basis of it we predict 
future events. 

Faith is still more evident as a working energy 
in the practical matters of life. Society could not 



Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 25 

exist an hour on a bare " knowledge " basis. All 
banks would suspend, all laws would become in- 
valid, the world would be turned into a vast insane 
asylum, each individual living in solitary isolation 
in the whirl of his own ideas. Marriage and 
home-building are beautiful instances of faith. 
No one ever " knows," or can ^' know," that in 
the stress of years, in the give and take of life, in 
the lights and shadows of this world of mutabil- 
ity, the friend of his youthful fancy will grow 
dearer and truer, more inwardly beautiful and in- 
dispensable to him, and that their two individual 
lives and wills will merge into an indivisible union. 
Marriage is of necessity a venture of faith, as is 
friendship of every sort. That does not mean 
that it is a mere hazard, a blind guess. It too 
often is so, no doubt, but that is because the per- 
sons marrying make a hazard and are not guided 
by real faith. 

Real faith — faith which carries in itself a con- 
structive energy — always builds on solid founda- 
tions and can test its building as it builds. Mar- 
riage is always a hazard, a chance — to use the 
current society word, it is ''a gamble" — unless 
the two persons who are to marry have already a 
sufficient experience of love and friendship with 
each other to warrant the faith that their intended 



26 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 

future Will increase in worth and joy. If mar- 
riages are made for money or for beauty or social 
standing, there is, of course, very little ground for 
faith in a happy future union which will grow truer 
and deeper as the years go. But if the two lives 
have already found each other and are united in 
common interests, in genuine friendship, in happy 
personal fellowship; if their love has its roots in 
moral character and not in surface traits, the step 
is still a venture of faith, but it is a faith guaran- 
teed and tested by experience. Faith in this case 
is merely building out upon the solid pillars of ex- 
perience. It is the power to see and to appreciate 
and to trust what still remains hidden from us in 
the life we have already proved. It is a well- 
grounded belief that the future will bring out 
and fulfill what the life we have come to know 
promises and prophesies. We trust the un- 
seen to complete the seen, and we make our 
venture. 

Religious faith in its highest and best sense is 
of this type. It is not blind groping, haphazard 
believing. It is building out upon the solid pil- 
lars of the soul's experience. It is the soul's 
power to see what fits and fulfills and completes 
what is already here. Our very finite nature calls 
for a world of infinite reahty to fulfill it. Our 



Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 27 

hunger and thirst of soul reveal something in us 
which no earthly supplies can satisfy. Our sins 
and failures and frailties call for the help and 
healing of a divine Savior. We are made so that 
we cannot live without streams of spiritual energy, 
without the incoming of saving grace and trans- 
forming power. We cannot be victorious and 
triumphant without a heavenly Friend, a divine 
Companion. And in our need, in our stress, he 
offers himself to us. He comes with his help 
and healing. He seems completely to fit our need. 
But only a venture of faith can settle the matter 
for us. He has saved others. He has enabled 
others to more than conquer. It is a safe ven- 
ture, and it stands and vindicates every test. 

Ill 

A RELIGION WHICH DOES THINGS 

In his recent book, A Challenge to the Church, 
William Temple says : 

" The religious experience, which is indeed the soul 
of personal religion, does not consist in passing states, 
but is what the name should imply — an experience whole 
and entire which is religious through and through, so 
that our experience of business, of politics, of art, and 
of all human relationships becomes a religious experience." 



28 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 

He goes on further to say that the exalted mo- 
ments of high-tide experience, when the soul feels 
flooded with unusual incomes of divine life, 
" should be merely moments perpetually renewing 
the light in which we see the world and the vital 
strength by which we live among men." 

This IS a modern way of saying what was so 
wonderfully said in a letter written on the shores 
of the JEge2in Sea by a man who was *' fighting 
beasts " in an ancient city, " dying daily " with 
crucifying struggles, and perpetually confronted 
with entrenched evils and iniquitous customs. On 
top of his load of perplexities in Ephesus had just 
been piled the news of the growing disintegration 
of his church across the sea in Corinth. A tale of 
woe was pouring in — now from " the house of 
Chloe," now again from a delegation of the 
church sent over to ask help, and finally through 
an epistle which some of his friends wrote to him. 
It becomes only too clear that much '' wood, hay, 
and stubble " had been built in with the purer 
saintly material there. Divisions and conten- 
tions were playing havoc. Crass immoralities, 
well known in that environment, were assailing 
the members. Unanswerable metaphysical ques- 
tions were confusing their minds, and practical 



Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 29 

problems of organization and procedure were 
urgently pressing for solution. 

Somewhere in a little room of a private house 
— perhaps of a certain Mary then living in Ephe- 
sus, '' who bestowed much labor upon us " — the 
marvelous message was written to those " called 
to be saints " in Corinth. The thing I preached 
among you in those months of fellowship, he tells 
them, was not a novel philosophy subject to end- 
less debate. I made you acquainted with a new 
power of life, an energy of salvation that demon- 
strates itself through the whole life of the whole 
man, until the entire personality, body and all, 
becomes a temple, a place where the Spirit of God 
is manifested. This religion of life and demon- 
stration, expressed everywhere in this ^Egean let- 
ter, comes to its full splendor of expression in the 
thirteenth chapter, where the beauty of the style 
suddenly reveals the greatness of the soul of the 
man, as great style always does. Religion, as it 
comes to light in this extraordinary passage, is 
not some rare exalted state, some startling ecstasy, 
some spectacular wonder granted to a favorite 
saint. Many persons coveted this high state and 
strained after it. They looked upon the striking 
'* gift of tongues," the power to speak some celes- 



30 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 

tial language sucK as angels speak, as the very pin- 
nacle of religion. It is not so, these great words 
tell them. One may attain that goal, achieve that 
state, and still be only like '' a noisy gong " that 
attracts attention. Nor again is religion to be 
found in a signal acquisition of knowledge. One 
may understand the mysteries and unravel the se- 
crets of nature and yet fail to arrive anywhere. 
He may be able to extend his powers of vision by 
aid of microscope and telescope; he may invent 
engines which add unsuspected powers of speed 
to his legs ; he may construct mechanisms that 
carry his voice with amazing quickness across 
wide spaces; he may fly faster and farther than 
any bird. And yet all this may bring no incre- 
ment to his soul. With all his added range of 
knowledge, he himself, in all that really concerns 
life, may be a zero — '' nothing." 

Religion is not found then, is not revealed, in 
an isolated and separable aspect of life. It is a 
way of living which affects the whole of life, inner 
and outer, in all its attitudes and relationships. 
If one word is to be found which gathers up and 
expresses this complete spiritualization of life, the 
best word for it is St. Paul's untranslatable agape^ 
which means a living power flowing through all 
the activities of daily life, touching every aspect. 



Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 31 

transforming every relationship, and bringing a 
vital strength into every cooperative effort. We 
translate it as *' love/' but we must not think of 
it as ^' a soft and cooing " thing, an emotional 
state, or sentimental gush. It is primarily power. 
It is energy expressing itself in action. 

In fact, the only way to grasp its meaning ade- 
quately is to turn to the supreme exhibition of it 
and that is in Christ crucified, where the power of 
God making men saved comes to full revelation. 
One typical race looked for God in rare and spec- 
tacular events, in signs and wonders. Another 
group expected to find him through speculation 
and dialectic, and thrilled over the construction of 
vast intellectual systems. But no external '' sign " 
can reveal God's character. No system of knowl- 
edge can bring to light the inner nature of the 
Eternal Heart. Only experience will suffice for 
that, and an experience of it is possible only if 
God himself breaks through somewhere in the 
universe and reveals the heart we seek in a life 
we can appreciate and interpret. Christ is the 
place in the universe where God himself breaks 
through and shows the power of love in full oper- 
ation. Not as storm and thunder, not as fire and 
earthquake, but as love, that suffers long and is 
kind and will not let go, does God come to seek 



32 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 

us and find us and save us. We could go on in 
our sin and stand anything but that. When that 
love is clearly seen and felt and known, it con- 
quers, and it more than conquers. It becomes the 
most dynamic moral force in the universe. It 
saves, it renews, it transforms, it vitalizes, it spir- 
itualizes. It works the one real miracle which 
proves that God has come. It makes out of men 
like us persons who can exhibit and transmit the 
same love which saved us. We discover how to 
become living epistles of the thirteenth of First 
Corinthians ! 

IV 

THE GOSPEL OF GOD WITH US 

In one of the most wonderful passages ever 
written by anybody (2 Cor. III. 5), St. Paul con- 
trasts the two types of religion, one of which he 
calls " the ministry of condemnation," and the 
other " the ministry of righteousness "; one '* the 
ministry of the letter," the other ^' the ministry of 
the spirit"; one ''the ministry of the old cove- 
nant," which is passing away, the other " the min- 
istry of the new covenant," which remains. The 
primary difference between the two types of reli- 
gion lies for him in the fact that the '' old," as 



Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 33 

he calls it, is external. It is a legal system writ- 
ten in graven letters — imposed from without by 
a lawgiver and to be followed in detail under the 
expectation of death as the penalty of disobedi- 
ence. The mark and badge of it, he says, is al- 
ways slavery, and, in spite of the fact that the 
system is *' obeyed," the heart behind the veil re- 
mains all the time unchanged and untransformed. 
The '' new," on the other hand, is fundamen- 
tally inward and of the spirit. Instead of a law- 
giver who fulminates commands, with terror of 
condemnation, the God of all mercy and tender- 
ness '' shines into our hearts to give the light of 
his glorious knowledge in the face of Jesus 
Christ." And his revelation of light and grace 
and glory and righteousness does not remain out- 
side us as something foreign and external, but It 
becomes a formative life and power in us and 
makes us a living letter, or epistle, of Jesus Christ, 
with the new ministry of glory written in the 
Inmost substance of our being, so that the Chris- 
tian himself, and not a written document. Is the 
exhibition of the message or covenant — the be- 
liever himself Is the document. But, unlike the 
'' old " written code, the new document undergoes 
change and is capable of progress, for as the be- 
liever — the living epistle — lives unveiled In the 



34 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 

presence of the luminous Christ, he is changed into 
an ever-growing likeness by the working of the 
Spirit within him. He goes from glory to glory 
in an ever-heightening transformation of spirit, 
until men see in him the marks of the Lord Jesus. 
But there is no slavery here, for where the spirit 
of the Lord is there are liberty and inward free- 
dom, and obedience becomes a thing of joy. 

Once you enter upon this ministry of the new 
covenant — the ministry which liberates and 
which changes the minister himself into an epistle 
of Jesus Christ — you no longer '' faint " in the 
presence of difficulties and misunderstandings: 
'' having obtained this ministry we faint not." It 
is possible now to be '' pressed on every side, yet 
not straitened; to be perplexed, but not unto de- 
spair; to be smitten down, yet not destroyed, al- 
ways bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, 
so that the life also of Jesus is manifested in our 
bodies ! " That is the supreme boldness of St. 
Paul's wonderful message, that the life of Jesus 
can be so written in us that we can manifest it 
" in our mortal bodies " ; that the dying of the 
Lord Jesus can be '' borne about " in our lives 
as we live among men. 

Suddenly he rises to a new height, as though 
at that point a fresh inspiration swept over him. 



Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 35 

like a new sun risen on mid-noon. He now real- 
izes, apparently for the first time, that this new 
inward man, this hidden unseen self which the 
Spirit forms in us in likeness to the image and 
glory of Christ, will be a permanent and eternal 
self, capable of surviving '' the decaying of our 
outward man." If that is so, then the " dissolv- 
ing of our outward tent," the fleshly body, is a 
matter of no special concern, for we shall not be 
" naked," or '' uncovered," when that is gone, 
since by this inward spiritual process God has 
been constructing in us an immortal, eternal, heav- 
enly house or habitation, so that, even with the 
body gone, we shall be *' clothed " with our heav- 
enly house. God made us for this very thing, 
that mortality might be swallowed up of life, and 
in so far as we are changed into the divine image 
we have formed a permanent and ever-enduring 
inward self, which is always " at home with the 
Lord." 

That IS St. Paul's new ministry, which, he 
rightly claims, '' far exceeds in glory " the old 
ministry of the letter. It is certainly bold and 
daring, and it is still far beyond the slow faith 
and vision of most of us, who easily hark back to 
the literal, the tangible, and the external. We 
are still too unbelieving for '* the light of the gos- 



36 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 

pel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of 
God, to dawn in us." We talk of our new the- 
ologies and our old theologies, but these party- 
lines, these middle walls of partition, would all 
fall away and vanish if we could rise to this gospel 
of the new covenant — which is the transforma- 
tion of a man like us into a living document which 
manifests Christ, and into an immortal self which 
in any world will be " at home with the Lord." 



CHAPTER III 
THE WAY OF DEDICATION: 

I 

THE INNER COMPULSION 

' No life amounts to anything until it becomes 
absorbed in some aim which carries it out of and 
beyond itself. The man who is occupied in con- 
suming three meals a day, in dressing his body, 
and in giving it its due quota of comfortable sleep 
is superior to the oyster only in corporeal size; 
they are both biological specimens, only one is 
larger and more complicated than the other, and, 
because of his larger power, one of them can eat 
the other! Now, if this biological man is ever 
to rise above the biological level and be something 
more, he must discover a way of living which 
delivers him from the mere play of natural forces 
— the mere pursuit of materials for the animal 
life — and this lays upon him an inner compul- 
sion to devote himself to an ideal; that is, to an 
unselfish and spiritual cause, a cause for the pro- 

37 



38 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

motion and advancement of interests other than 
his own. Nobody gets out of the biological or- 
der of life until in some degree he has learned to 
say: *' For their sakes I consecrate myself." 

There are, of course, many degrees and scales 
of this struggle for the life of others, this conse- 
cration to unselfish causes, this way of living for 
aims that are enlarging and spiritual. Many a 
person finds that his occupation not only supplies 
him with food and clothing, but also gives him 
opportunities for the consecrated life. The shoe- 
maker who makes an absolutely honest shoe, not 
merely because he wants his wages, but still more 
because he wants the little unknown child that is 
to wear it to have a solid and durable shoe, who 
therefore pegs and stitches his own spirit of hon- 
esty into his piece of work — that man has risen 
above the biological scale and has found a way 
of living a life which has a touch of consecration 
upon it. 

The sweeper of city streets is, often enough, no 
doubt, a dull, stupid man who goes to his work 
with hardly more enthusiasm than the mule shows, 
and sweeps because he would starve if he did not 
work. But every now and then there is a sweeper 
of another type — a real '' white angel " who 
knows that city dust is laden with deadly germs 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 39 

and disease, and that unless this dust is well and 
carefully swept away it will endanger the lives of 
the city; and he knows, too, that in sweeping it he 
is risking his own life. In spite of that, he sweeps 
in the dark corners even when no inspector watches 
him, and forgets his own life in consecration to 
the safety of others. He belongs somewhere in 
the order of those unselfish and spiritual knights 
who have lost themselves to find themselves. 
" Telephone girls " do not usually impress us as 
consecrated, but when, as happened a few years 
ago in a terrible crisis which threatened two towns 
with annihilation, two of these exchange girls 
stayed at their post and risked their own lives to 
warn the citizens to flee before the oncoming wall 
of water, we must feel that they had formed and 
cultivated a way of living which took them out of 
self and consecrated them to unselfish aims. 

We stand almost appalled at the bald selfish- 
ness which is wrecking so many American homes. 
The number of cases in which the decree of di- 
vorce follows hard after the words, " until death 
do us part," has become ominous and staggering. 
But we must not overlook nor forget the millions 
of happy homes in which men and women are con- 
secrated through love ; in which husband and wife 
toil and sacrifice for each other and for their chil- 



40 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

dren in radiant joy, and in which, through sick- 
ness and death, through poverty and privation, 
through loss and sorrow, as well as in sunshine and 
prosperity, two persons have ceased to be two 
*' units " and are devoted to each other in self- 
forgetful love. Here, again, is consecration of 
no mean order. 

It is almost nineteen hundred years since a little 
band of men who heard '' words of life " from the 
lips of a wonderful Teacher forsook their nets 
and boats and fishing-tackle to follow him and, 
through consecration to him and his cause, found 
themselves on a new spiritual level. Sometimes 
the Church has failed to realize its mission and has 
been content to appeal to the self-side in men and 
to offer them an easy means of passage from a 
world of woe to a haven of refuge and a scene 
of peace and joy; and it may be that even now the 
Church is too much commercialized and permeated 
with a spirit of refined self-seeking; but still, as 
of old on the shores of Gennesaret, men, when they 
hear this Christ call, leave all with joy and follow 
him. There are plenty of Christians, no doubt, 
whose religion is formal and traditional and with- 
out much insight; many who blindly hold truths 
for which nobler men have suffered and died; but, 
nevertheless, there is a goodly number of men and 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 41 

women who are Christians by first-hand experi- 
ence, Christians who through Christ have found 
God and have consecrated themselves with joy to 
do his will and to lose themselves that they may 
find themselves in him. 

II 

THE ALL FOR THE ALL 

Religion — above all, Christ's religion — is 
not something which can thrive on a *' fifty-fifty '' 
basis. That simple Brother of the Common Life, 
Thomas a Kempis, was profoundly right when he 
said four hundred years ago, '' We must give the 
all for the All." The great religious leaders, the 
persons who have started a new line of march, 
have always known that truth, and it was their 
practice of it which more than anything else made 
them religious leaders. The Laodicean, neither 
hot nor cold, economical of spiritual zeal and exer- 
cising no more faith than is absolutely required 
for conventional religious purposes, with one eye 
on the main chance here below and the other 
turned feebly on the celestial gate, is a well-known 
type of Christian. But, however common the 
type may be, it is a pitiable, miserable failure. 



42 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

** Surely they see not God, I know, 

Nor all the chivalry of His, 
The soldier saints who, row on row, 

Burn upward each to his point of bliss — 
Since, the end of life being manifest. 

He had cut his way through the world to this." 

Nowhere does this virile, all-for-AU way of 
life find such striking emphasis and illustration as 
in the sayings and in the practice of the great 
Galilean. Religion for him is not an unneces- 
sary luxury; it is the staff of life, the bread and 
water by which men live. The *^ whole world " 
set over against this indispensable life of the soul 
weighs nothing. Even the eye that hinders the 
soul is to be bored out and the hand that inter- 
feres with the central life is to be hacked off and 
flung away, because there Is only one focal thing 
in the universe that matters and toward which all 
energies must bend. Two very simple, yet very 
profound, parables are told by the Master to illus- 
trate this principle of giving the all for the All. 
A man casually digging in a field hits upon a 
buried treasure which in some earlier time of war 
had been hastily hidden in the ground as the 
owner fled before the invading enemy. The 
finder, thrilling with joy over his happy discovery, 
goes and sells all that he possesses and invests 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 43 

everything in the field which contains his treasure. 
Another man, watching the pearl-divers come into 
port laden with their ^' finds," sees with his trained 
eye, among the many ordinary pearls, one price- 
less pearl. He hurries home, disposes of all his 
stock of goods, sells his shop and bit of land, and 
goes back to the divers and buys that lustrous 
pearl of great price which is worth all other pos- 
sessions. Those are Christ's figures to illustrate 
the true attitude of the soul toward the kingdom 
of God, the highest vision and ideal of life. It 
must not take its place alongside of other things 
and stand on a competitive level with them. It 
must rise high over all and become the absorbing 
goal and central pursuit of the soul. That is, be- 
yond question, the secret of spiritual power. The 
religion that costs nothing, that demands no hard 
sacrifices of other things, that does not lift the life 
out of low-level motives, is worth little and makes 
little difference to the life. The type of religion, 
on the other hand, which costs the all, which makes 
the cross the central fact that dominates the life as 
its one driving power, becomes an incalculable 
force and turns many to salvation. We have been 
trying to get on with the '' fifty-fifty " scheme. 
We have endeavored to take over ease with our 
comfortable religious faith. We have scaled 



44 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

down the demands to attract the economically 
minded. But it is now, as always, a false trail 
and an abortive undertaking. We must return 
to Thomas a Kempis's principle and learn to give 
the all for the All. We must go back still farther 
to the way set forth by a greater than the Brother 
of the Common Life and make everything else in 
the universe yield to the central call of the king- 
dom of God. 

Sacrifice for its own sake is asceticism. Sur- 
render, mortification, crucifixion as a dumb nega- 
tion of life cannot be recommended. It is always 
better to live in the yea than to live in the nay, 
where the yea is possible. But when a clear col- 
lision comes, when life forces a choice between the 
souFs true destiny and all else, then there must be 
a surrender of everything which tends to anchor 
the soul to its inland harbor when it should be 
sailing the open sea with God — the all must go 
for the sake of the All ! This higher way of life, 
this capacity to see real value, to let the bird in 
the hand go for the sake of catching the two in 
the bush, this power to live by the unseen and to 
insist on having God or nothing — that is what 
we mean by ^' faith." 

That It " works " there can be no doubt. That 
it produces a new quality of soul must be admitted. 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 45 

The spiritual experts have one testimony to give. 
For a sample opinion let us take the account of a 
little-known eighteenth-century saint, Thomas 
Story: 

" He called for my life and I offered it at His foot- 
stool; but He gave it me as a prey, with unspeakable ad- 
dition. He called for my will, and I resigned it at 
His call, but he returned me His own in token of His 
love. He called for the world and I laid it at His feet, 
with the crowns thereof; I withheld them not at the 
beckoning of His hand. But mark the benefit of ex- 
change ! For he gave me, instead of the earth, a kingdom 
of eternal peace, and in lieu of the crowns of vanity 
a crown of joy. . . . He gave me joy which no tongue 
can express and peace which passeth understanding. My 
heart was melted with the height of comfort; my soul 
was immersed in the depth of joy; my eyes overflowed 
with tears of greatest pleasure. ... I begged Himself 
and He gave All.'' 

Ill 
HABAKKUKEANS 

In a charming essay written several years ago 
Dr. William Osier — now Sir William — dealt 
with two groups of people whom he called, respec- 
tively, Gallionians and Salomics. The Gallio- 
nians, named from Gallio in Corinth, who " cared 
for none of these things," are, in the famous doc- 



46 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

( 
tor's essay, persons who are too busy with the 

affairs of this world to give any time or thought to 
spiritual issues; There are surely many Gallio- 
nians among us still ! The Salomics, named after 
Salome, supposed to be the mother of the sons of 
Zebedee, who asked Jesus to give the highest com- 
missions in his gift to her sons, are those persons 
who look upon religion as a way of promoting 
themselves, of advancing their position. Salome 
meant well. She loved the boys she had borne 
and brought up and she wanted to do as well as 
she could for them. She believed, as so many 
mothers since her day have believed, that the 
great thing to pray for and push for in this world 
is visible success. She knew of nothing better or 
more to be desired than position, place, and 
power. She had dreamed, ever since she was a 
little girl, of a coming great king who would break 
the yoke of Rome, make Jerusalem a free, holy 
city, a center of the new age — who would be a 
world-ruler, with a splendid court on Mount Zion. 
What glory to have two sons in that court ! Could 
a mother aspire to any loftier triumph than to 
have her boys sit on either side of the throne of 
this Messianic king! What a prospect for two 
fishermen of the Galilean lake ! 

It took some courage to come out with her re- 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 47 

quest, but she had carried it for weeks on her 
heart and, at last when the opportunity favored, 
it slipped off her lips, and the word was spoken: 
'' Lord, grant that my two sons may sit one on thy 
right hand and the other on thy left, when thou 
comest into thy kingdom." 

*' That is not the right thing to ask," is the 
solemn answer. '' It shows ignorance of the real 
nature of the kingdom. He who aspires to enter 
my kingdom must not expect places, but suffer- 
ing; not honors, but opportunities to sacrifice; not 
rewards, but hard baptisms. Are thy two sons 
able to suffer with me? " 

The world has never learned the lesson which 
this ambitious mother's experience ought to teach. 
There is still much Salomic religion in all churches. 
The stress is laid on rewards ; the ambition is for 
the glory of place. The old ignorance of the real 
nature of the kingdom is living on. 

We cannot expect to have a religion of power 
until we get beyond a religion of selfishness and 
of self-seeking. The person who is " saved " by 
an appeal to some selfish interest will need to be 
" saved " again, and the saving process will have 
to be repeated until he is saved from himself. 
" Ye are not seeking the right thing " would be 
spoken to many of us if the Master were among 



48 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

us as of old. He would ask if we were ready for 
our share of toil and pain, ready for the cup and 
the baptism; ready to see the ambition for easy 
glory blighted completely; ready to see everything 
go but the spirit of love and consecration. Sa- 
lomic religion dies hard; it is rooted deep in our 
instincts. Men have all along been seeking for 
harps and robes and crowns. They have dreamed 
of golden streets and blissful mansions. They 
are praying for rest and ease. Are they the right 
things to ask? Is it not Salome's blunder over 
again? 

There is still a third type of persons which Dr. 
Osier did not mention in his essay. I shall call 
them Habakkukeans. I am sorry to use such a 
barbaric-looking and sounding word, but it names 
a very real type and one which we greatly need to 
have increased. Through some hard and tremen- 
dous experience this ancient prophet, Habakkuk, 
had discovered that the only thing which matters 
after all is finding God and being in close fellow- 
ship with him. Everything else may go — if he 
abides sure. Listen to his great declaration of 
faith: *' Although the fig-tree may not blossom, 
neither shall there be any fruit in the vines; the 
labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall 
yield no meat; the flock shall be cut oS from the 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 49 

fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet\ 
/I will rejoice in the Lord and joy in the God of 
my salvation — and I will walk in my high 
places ! " Here at last selfishness is washed out. 
Religion is no longer a successful system of dou- 
ble-entry bookkeeping. God is loved now for 
his own sake, and the soul triumphs whether the 
bank-account prospers or not. Satan's sneer in 
the book. of Job — that pious people never serve 
God for naught, but have an eye out for returns — 
is well answered. Here is a stalwart man whose 
known biography could be written on a thumb-nail 
but whose faith shines like a beacon across the 
dead centuries. He flung out that great word, 
which furnished both St. Paul and Martin Luther 
with a watchword : " The righteous man shall 
live by his faith." Everything else can be dis- 
pensed with if only faith in God remains, for a 
man can live by thatl 

The white soul, the purified inner nature, the 

heart aflame with love for God, the whole self 

consecrated to service — these are the things to 

seek. To have attained that spirit is to be a 

V Habakkukean ! 



50 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

IV 

CONSECRATION TO SERVICE 

Almost all Paul's Epistles divide into two well- 
defined parts : the second part in each case being 
introduced by a therefore, which marks a kind of 
watershed of the Epistle. What goes before this 
momentous therefore is devoted in the main to an 
illumination of the Divine plan and purpose — an 
unfolding of the Grace of God as the dynamic to 
salvation. What comes after the watershed 
therefore is an appeal for action, a call to human 
consecration and devotion — in a word is the prac- 
tical application of the message about God and 
his Grace: *' I beseech you therefore, brethren, 
by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a 
living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, as an in- 
telligent service. And be not fashioned accord- 
ing to this world, but be transformed by the re- 
newing of your mind, that ye may prove what is 
the good and acceptable and perfect will of God " 
(Rom. XII. 1-2). \ 

The self-revealing nature of God, his self- 
sacrificing, self-giving love is the moral dynamic 
of the gospel, the virtue-making power; but noth- 
ing defeats religion more effectively than to turn 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 51 

this living fact into doctrine and dogma as though 
it were the sum and the end of religion. The 
great teachers of the New Testament always 
put the final emphasis on deed, on action, on 
life, on character. *' He that heareth these say- 
ings of mine and doeth them " is the rock-man. 
" Not every one that sayeth, Lord, Lord, shall 
enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth 
the will of my Father." In fact the very condi- 
tion of the revelation of truth is obedient action : 
*' He that doeth the will shall know of the doc- 
trine." This same pragmatic method runs 
through all the Epistles. The Apostle James, 
who seems sometimes rather pious and legal than 
profoundly religious, has nevertheless given us a 
great piece of psychological insight, as fresh and 
modern as though it were written by his unapos- 
tolic namesake Professor James. He says that 
*' if any one is a hearer of the divine word and not 
a doer of it, he is like a man who sees his natural 
face in a mirror, for he looks at himself, and then 
goes away and quickly forgets how he looked." 
It is a notorious fact that none of us can visualize 
our own faces from memory. We see ourselves 
often enough, but the image fades out at once and 
leaves us only a vague blur. Just the same way 
goodness which is only thought about and not 



52 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

translated into motor effect, — emotions over the 
love of God which never drive us into personal 
actions of love, — quickly fade away and leave us 
as though they had not been, or rather leave us 
weaker and worse for the fruitless evaporation. 
PauFs Epistles ring everywhere with trumpet- 
calls to action, and even the casual reader must be 
impressed with the athletic temper of these great 
spiritual documents. One hears him call to his 
young friend, Timothy, as though from the side 
lines, ''Exercise thyself unto godliness; fight the 
good fight of faith " ; and nobody can forget the 
picture of the ideal Christian cap-a-pie with his 
face set for knightly action. " Stand, therefore^ 
having girded your loins with truth, and having 
put on the breastplate of righteousness, and hav- 
ing shod your feet with the preparation of the 
gospel of peace; withal taking the shield of faith; 
and take the helmet of salvation and the sword 
of the Spirit" (Eph. VI. 14-17). John's mes- 
sage, throbbing as it is with the memory of the 
Word of Life, which his hands have handled, and 
glorified as it is by its upward look to God, who at 
last is known as Love, is as practical and prag- 
matic as the rest, with its reiterated test of religion 
in practical love : '* Hereby shall we know that 
we are born of God, if we love!^ And finally the 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 53 

Apocalypse closes the New Testament with a re- 
frain on overcoming, which to this writer means 
not an easy flight from the world, but the subordi- 
nation of the lower appetites and desires to higher 
ends, and a dedication of the will to goodness, out 
of love for him who has loved us with a redeem- 
ing love. This great prophetic book ends with 
the followers of Christ, united in a relation to 
him (which in beautiful figurative language is 
called a bridal relation), and joining with the in- 
visible Spirit in the unending work of bringing 
men to God — *' the Spirit and the Bride say 
come ! " 

I have in the briefest possible way tried to 
show that the stress of the New Testament is on 
action, not on dogma, on the dedication of the 
whole self to goodness, not on beatific vision. 
The Gospel message culminates in its compelling 
appeal to follow Christ, in its constraint of love 
to live as he lived — "He loved me and gave 
himself for me, therefore the life I now live in 
the flesh I live in the faith of the Son." 

Consecration in some degree is involved in any 
sane or rational life. It is only the person who 
can forget himself, and become absorbed in some 
large aim or end of life, that can enter into the 
joy of living; and it is only the person who can 



54 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

thus forget himself in his work that can do any- 
thing well. '' If I lose myself I find myself," was 
Galahad's preparation for finding the Holy Grail, 
and it is a first law of life for anybody who wishes 
to make his life count. It is a great mistake to 
suppose that '' consecration " is a word which be- 
longs only in the religious vocabulary. It is the 
secret of everybody's power. All work of every 
sort that has a touch of genius in it has come out 
of consecration, and it has come from somebody 
that forgot himself in his work. 

Seven times over, in our Gospel records, Christ 
says, " He that saves his life shall lose it, and he 
that loses his life shall find it." It is a law of life 
at least as elemental and universal as " survival of 
the fittest," and there are few tragedies greater 
than the tragedy we see so often repeated, of per- 
sons who with intense passion have pursued pleas- 
ure, and have stormed the citadels of success, and 
have come to the end of life with their lean hands 
empty, and their hearts burned out to dull ash, 
with no hope and no faith in any larger good to 
be, because they have never lost themselves in any 
noble task or service and so have never found 
themselves I The happy people in the world are 
not the persons of large leisure, whose loins are 
ungirt, whose lamps are unlit and who have no 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 55 

work to do except occasionally to shake the bread- 
fruit tree. The happy people are toilers, conse- 
crated to difficult tasks, absorbed in doing things, 
finding their lives by sinking them in the world's 
work and the world's problems. 

I want to keep continually in the foreground 
the fact that consecration must not be a mere emo- 
tional giving of life to causes. The things that 
matter most are ( i ) What you put your life into, 
and (2) What kind of a life you put in. The 
reason that it matters so much what you put your 
life into is that some things are so much more 
worth doing than other things are, that is, they 
forward the welfare of the race better than other 
things do. The man who can teach men has no 
right to raise turnips. Then, too, we all have 
special gifts and aptitudes which peculiarly fit us 
for some tasks rather than for other tasks. The 
very possession of a marked aptitude or gift is in 
itself a divine call, and carries with it a summons 
to service — a noblesse oblige. 

But it is of vastly more importance what kind 
of life you put in. Emerson says that the Gulf- 
stream will run through a straw if it is parallel to 
the current, — and so it will, — that is, a little of 
it will, but a great deal more of it will run through 
a ten-foot pipe. A life of a single candle-power 



56 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

and of a single horse-power will do something if 
it is consecrated to a definite mission, but the hun- 
dred-power life is much more economic! It uses 
no more raw material, while its impact on the race, 
its circle of dynamic influence, is vastly greater, 
and it gathers power as it goes, like a falling stone. 
The first concern, then, of any one who is eager 
to live a consecrated life should be to become as 
much of a person as may be. Culture and conse- 
cration ought never to be separated. They are 
when cut apart like the two blades of the scissors 
with the rivet gone. Culture alone is cold and 
thin. Consecration alone is weak and empty. 
** For their sakes I sanctify myself," was the great 
word of the Master : '' for their sakes I put myself 
at my best " ought to be the aim of us all. The 
doctor who has a passion for saving life fulfills his 
mission best, not by hurrying into it unequipped 
and untrained, but by taking years of his precious 
life in learning how to do it. The life-saver is 
consecrated to no purpose if he cannot row in the 
storm and swim in the breaking sea. The mother 
may be ever so consecrated to the interests of her 
child, but she must as well know how little lives are 
rightly developed, and she must know the relative 
value of spanking and sugar-plums. The social 
worker may be as consecrated as St. Francis, and 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 57 

yet may waste his life if he is unsound in sociology 
and awry in economic theory. Self-enlargement 
and self-giving are the two indissoluble traits of 
a good life. 

It perhaps needs hardly to be said (it is so evi- 
dent) that true consecration can never be reached 
by artificial methods, or by sheer effort. The life 
must be kindled by an inward passion for an end 
that is large enough and high enough to feed the 
life and draw it on. The moment we discover 
that a person is ^' doing good " for selfish ends and 
with a view to utilitarian results, we despise his 
good deeds and will have none of them, for, in the 
last analysis, it is the life that we appreciate, and 
not the '' things." In fact the highest consecra- 
tion is, like genius, unconscious of itself. The 
person who is gloriously consecrated Is so com- 
pletely absorbed in the task he has to do, so inter- 
ested working out the end of goodness which he 
has in view, that he is hardly aware that he is sac- 
rificing his life to it. Grace Darling could never 
understand why her heroic act stirred England so 
powerfully: in artless simplicity she used to say, 
'' I did what everybody else would have done." 
There is a fine naivete in words which Christ puts 
in the mouths of the blessed ones on his right hand: 
" When did we do all these things for which we 



58 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

are commended?" What a great word that is 
which the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews uses 
to utter the very essence of Christ's sublime sacri- 
fice: ** Who for the joy that was set before him 
endured the Cross ! " 

Vj 

POURED OUT 

In the annals of David's life there is a very fine 
story of heroic daring, and of the way David by 
a sudden inspiration turned the splendid bravery 
of his men into a religious sacrament. In the 
midst of hard battle, David expressed a longing 
for a drink of water out of the well at the gate of 
Bethlehem, at a time when Bethlehem was held 
by the army of the Philistines. Three of the 
most valiant of David's *' mighty men " at once 
volunteered to break through the enemies' line and 
get the water for their king. At the risk of their 
lives they got through to the well and brought the 
skin of hard-won water back to David. If he 
had done the usual thing and had drunk the water 
which his brave men had got for him, we should 
never have heard the story, but he did not drink 
it. It seemed to him too precious, too deeply 
tinged with the blood-red spirit of risk and sacri- 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 59 

fice, to be put to common, ordinary uses, and, up- 
lifted by the beauty of the deed, David poured the 
water out unto the Lord. 

What a waste ! What a way to treat his brave 
men! is the comment of dull common-sense. 
What a pity for the dry sand to drink up the water 
that had been got at such a venture ! is the philis- 
tine view of the matter. But to those who have 
eyes for the inner meaning of deeds, this act of 
David's brings to light the fascinating, attractive 
quality of character which has made the first king 
of Judah with all his faults an immortal figure. 
He does the sublime and unexpected thing. He 
will not turn to personal, selfish uses the gift 
which comes to him deeply colored with the sac- 
rificial daring of his men. The wine-skin holds 
for him not water to be drunk, but the precious 
life-blood of brave men to be offered to the Lord 
as a sacrament of love. There is a parallel story 
in the New Testament that is still finer and more 
moving. A woman who has suddenly found a 
new life, a new hope, a new power through the un- 
expected gentleness and tenderness of Christ and 
through his extraordinary faith in her comes in at 
a dinner where he is and, in a moment of over- 
mastering love and gratitude at the memory of 
the past, she breaks a costly alabaster vase of 



6o THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

priceless perfume and pours it recklessly out upon 
the Saviour's feet. The common-sense observers 
cry out against the waste, and the economically 
minded figure out how much could have been pur- 
chased with this spilled ointment, but Christ sees 
further. He instantly catches the deeper mean- 
ing. For him, it is the revelation of a spirit, a 
devotion, a passion that loves and that cannot stop 
to figure and calculate. He sees that there is at 
least one person in the world who understands 
him, who has discovered his way, and who feels 
the absolute worth of love. She has not sold her 
perfume to inaugurate some paltry charity that 
would bring her cheap fame; she has instead, with- 
out any calculation, made an undying sacrament 
of it. 

The world is full of chances for this kind of 
sacramental service. There is hardly anything 
which touches our higher life that is not blood-red 
with the sacrifices that won it for us. The privi- 
leges that have become our common heritage have 
all cost an untold amount of venture and daring 
and suffering and death. We too often take 
these things as a matter of course. We use them 
as we do the air and sunlight as though they were 
ours by right of birth and we do not have the high 
quality of poetry and religion in our nature that 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 6i 

makes us able to raise them to a sacramental ser- 
vice as we should. 

The Cross itself has again and again been 
thought of and used as a symbol of security: " He 
paid the price"; "He died that we might be 
safe." It is seized upon as a way of relief. 
Everything has been done for us without us. 
Our title is now clear to mansions In the skies. 
Surely not thus should we accept the sacrifice. If 
it is what the most devout souls have believed it to 
be, then all life henceforth must be colored and 
altered by this unparalleled act of love and sacri- 
fice. Instead of bringing us the seal of perpetual 
security, instead of being meant for our own selfish 
relief, it is a call to us to pour out the life that has 
been given to us in the highest way of sacramental 
service to which we can raise our vision. If re- 
demption has come to us in this way of uncalculat- 
ing love, then we can never live again in the poor, 
thin, common, plodding way of old; the love of 
Christ " constrains us " to live the bold and dar- 
ing way of faith and love that ventures all and 
keeps back nothing. 

The tremendous cost of freedom and of self- 
government makes the word "country" mean 
something new when we see It colored with un- 
stinted sacrifice. But here again we cannot 



62 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 

calmly drink the precious water to quench our own 
private thirst. We cannot settle down in security 
and enjoy in peace the treasures which others have 
won for us. Noblesse oblige. We are bound as 
patriotic sons of noble fathers to make their sac- 
rificial gains genuine sacraments of life. We can 
do this best by risking all that freedom means to 
us, all that country stands for in our vision, in a 
brave effort to bring forth and secure for our 
children a still greater freedom and a still loftier 
country. Patriotic service is made the truest sac- 
rament when it is devoted to the task of raising 
patriotism itself to its higher meaning. " The 
greatest legacy the hero leaves his race is — to 
have been a hero." 

Our own religion, born in heroic endeavor and 
baptized in unstinted suffering, bravely borne, has 
not seldom been quietly accepted as a way of ease 
and security. The water brought at such risk has 
been drunk in shelter and in peace. We have 
often felt that we were doing enough if we en- 
joyed our privileges and passed them on, but 
slightly shrunken, to the next generation. Our 
ideal has been '^ preservation." We have aimed 
to guard and keep, to have and to hold. 

It will not do. It is a miserable ambition. It 
Is time for us to discover the sacramental way of 



Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 63 

treating this precious water which our ancestors 
drew for us. We cannot use it for our private 
enjoyment, we cannot save it for our children, we 
cannot treat it as ours, we must pour it out in un- 
calculating, self-forgetful devotion. It is better 
that we should lose it than that we should merely 
succeed in saving it for our own ends. It is too 
sacred, too red with the life-blood of heroes, to be 
used in the dull, common way of commonplace 
men. It must be poured out like the Bethlehem 
water, like the Bethany perfume, like the life of 
Christ, poured out without counting the cost or 
calculating the results, and made a real sacrament 
of life, a spontaneous bestowal of love for love's 
sake. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 

I 

THE PLUMB-LINE 

One of the most vivid pictures In the Old 
Testament is that which the prophet Amos gives 
us of the Lord standing in the midst of Israel and 
holding a plumb-line in his hand. 

The popular idea of a prophet conceives him 
to be a strange-looking man, wild-eyed, highly 
wrought, given to fanciful visions and, in the main, 
a mysterious fore-teller of remote events. In real 
fact he was strikingly unlike that crude sketch. 
The distinctive prophet was a person of rare san- 
ity and balance, a man who could look straight at 
facts and with clairvoyant insight could see 
through them and discover what they involved. 
He could tell from the lines and curves of move- 
ments and events and motives how they would 
necessarily fulfill themselves as they unfolded with 
the process of time. In the proper sense of the 

64 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 65 

word, he was not primarily a fore-teller, he was a 
revealer of the deeper meaning of present existing 
conditions. He possessed an unerring sense of 
the direction in which deeds were carrying on the 
doer of them, as unerring as the artist's sense of 
harmony or of beauty. It was this power of 
moral insight that made the prophets the states- 
men of their epochs. They saw and proclaimed 
the trend and drift of policies. They looked on 
through and announced in advance where a given 
course would finally terminate. They were In- 
tense patriots, but their supreme loyalty and devo- 
tion was to the ideal country, the country as It 
ought to be, and they judged all policies and ex- 
pedients In the light of their clear Insight. 

Amos, a keeper of sheep and a dresser of vine- 
yards, in the country about Tekoa, was the first of 
the literary prophets and one of the profoundest 
moral revealers of any age. He was not afraid 
of " the face of clay." He dared to say before 
any man, or any group of men, what he actually 
thought. He understood the movements going on 
around him as clearly as he understood the habits 
of his sheep. 

" He read each wound, each weakness clear, 

He struck his finger on the place; 

And said : * Thou ailest here, and here.' " 



66 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV] 

But the great thing after all which he announces 
in his plumb-line figure Is the fact of an un- 
escapable, Inexorable, pervasive law of moral 
gravitation In the universe. There Is no caprice 
about moral results. You cannot hoodwink the 
forces which fulfill events. As fire burns your 
hand, if you play with it carelessly, as gravity will 
tumble you over the precipice, if you step falsely 
on the narrow ledge, so, too, the swing of inevit- 
able moral consequences will follow as a doom the 
deeds of men and of nations. '' By no clever 
trickery," wrote one of our sound present-day 
teachers, *' can profligacy or low living come Into 
possession of the beatitudes." There hangs the 
plumb-line, dropped as from the hand of God and 
by it every deed is tested. There is no favoritism, 
no wheedling, no capricious exception. If the life 
is unplumb, if the deeds and policies of it swing 
away from a line of rectitude, nothing can save 
the structure from collapse — nothing but a re- 
building of it in conformity with the moral laws 
of gravitation. 

This deeper prophecy which lays bare the 
eternal nature of things and which announces days 
of judgment as always coming Is a characteristic 
not only of Amos and the other rugged prophets 
of Israel and Judah, but it is as well an Inherent 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 67 

feature of the work of all the greatest interpreters 
of life. Euripides saw the plumb-line as clearly 
as Amos did. He will not believe in the popular, 
capricious, immoral gods — '' gods who do aught 
base are not gods at all." But he does believe, 
with all the virility of his great soul, in the moral 
purpose of that eternal nature of things, 

" Whom veils enfold 

Of light, of dark night flecked with gleams of gold, 

Of star-hosts dancing round thee without end." 

He — that unerring moral will — guides all 
things in accordance with truth and goodness. 

Socrates is another prophet who knew, with 
clear Insight, that the foundations of the universe 
rest upon immovable pillars of righteousness. A 
man can always swing boldly out and trust the 
moral nature of the universe. The only evil thing 
in the world, he thinks, Is to do evil. To suffer 
Injustice for a brief span Is no great hardship, but 
to'be attached by act of will to a course of injustice 
Is the one thing that can have no happy outcome — 
'' I know," he declares, and in most particulars he 
professed to know very little, " I know that injus- 
tice and disobedience to a better Is always evil and 
dishonorable." '' Think not of life and children 
first and of justice afterwards, but of justice first. 



68 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 

If you go about returning evil for evil, and injury 
for injury, breaking covenants and agreements, 
wronging those whom you ought not to wrong, the 
laws of the invisible world will treat you as an 
enemy." 

The greatest of the poets bear witness to this 
fact of the plumb-line. Dante is not mainly con- 
cerned with a supernal world beyond the stars or 
with a dire region of doom under the earth. He 
is merely telling us of the inevitable recoil of deeds 
and choices. Every man is building the house 
which he is going to inhabit, and is now creating 
the climate and atmosphere that will inevitably 
bring him an environment of joy or woe. 

Nobody can ever forget the scene in Hamlet, 
where Shakespeare gives us, as he so often does in 
this and other plays, his announcement of this law 
of the plumb-line. The wicked king is trying to 
pray — but he cannot find any form of prayer 
that can be efficacious until he changes his moral 
attitude and gets a new purpose of heart. 

** What form of prayer 
Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder? 
That cannot be; since I am still possessed 
Of those effects for which I did the murder, 
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen. 
May one be pardoned, and retain th^ offense? 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 69 

In the corrupted currents of this world 
Offenses gilded hand may shove by justice; 
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself 
Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above; 
There is no shuffling, — there the action lies 
In its true nature,'' 

Among our more modern prophets, Emerson 
has given as robust expression to the law of moral 
gravitation as any have given, especially in his 
great Essay on " Compensation." His finest 
short statement of the truth is, however, to be 
found in his Address on Abraham Lincoln, in 
which he says : 

'* There is a serene Providence which rules the fate of 
nations, which makes little account of time, little of one 
generation or race, makes no account of disasters, con- 
quers alike by what is called defeat or by what is called 
victory, thrusts aside enemy and obstruction, crushes 
everything immoral as inhuman, and obtains the ultimate 
triumph of the best race by the sacrifice of everything 
that resists the moral laws of the world." 

The question remains to be asked, whether this 
is merely a theory of certain idealists and dream- 
ers, whom we name '^ prophets/' or whether it is 
indeed so; i. e., a real truth of the eternal nature 
of things. Nobody ever can " prove " such a 
mighty assertion about our universe. It is impos- 



70 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 

sible to demonstrate that every deed carries its 
inevitable nemesis in itself and that moral conse- 
quences are as unvarying as the law of gravitation 
or the swing of planetary orbits. But everything 
we know about habit and character tends to verify 
this law of the prophets. The man himself, as 
William James says, may not '' count " his wrong 
deed, '' and a kind heaven may not count it; but it 
is being counted none the less. Down among his 
nerve-cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, 
registering it and storing it up to be used against 
him when the next temptation comes." Apparent 
** success " and a seeming ^' efficiency " that brings 
coveted '' results " are poor substitutes for a 
rightly fashioned life. The world with its crasser 
judgments may approve the men who seem to hit 
the desired goals, but the triumph is dearly bought 
if it has been won by the sacrifice of the growth of 
the soul itself. 

Whether the moral law is cosmic, i. e., whether 
the entire universe in all its processes is working 
out a moral purpose, and every least movement of 
evolving matter is cooperant to a moral end, is 
too large a question for us to answer. There are 
certainly many facts which challenge such a faith. 
But it is hard to see how anything can be moving 
to no purpose, how any cosmos can come by acci- 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 71 

dent; how, again, some things can be steered to 
intelligent purpose and others be only random hap- 
penings. It is certain that some regions of the 
universe reveal a moral law of gravitation, that 
in some areas the eternal plumb-line is set up and 
operates inevitably. It may be that it does every- 
where. It is the safest guess. In his famous 
Romanes Lecture of 1893- — ''Evolution and 
Ethics " — Huxley comes face to face with the 
immense ground swell of ethical purpose and 
moral process in the world and he tries to discover 
its source and origin. He thinks that it cannot be 
cosmic; it cannot belong to the nature of things. 
It must have come in afterwards; it must be super- 
posed upon a non-moral '' nature." But this con- 
clusion of the perplexed naturalist will hardly do. 
The cosmic records need to be more closely and 
carefully searched again. It may be after all that 
the prophets are right, and that the plumb-line 
which Amos saw is fixed in the very cosmic nature 
of things. 

II 

THE FACT OF MUST 

Must Is one of the easiest verbs in the English 
language to conjugate. It is gloriously defective, 



72 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 

with its one mood and one tense. But if ever a 
word weighed a ton it is this same little defective 
verb. We meet it at all ages and on all levels of 
life, and it holds us like a tested line of trench. 
We very early discover that all mathematical 
facts not only are what they are but that they 
must be so. When we have once learned the mul- 
tiplication table, we come to realize that it is good 
not only for the local latitude and longitude where 
we happen to live, but it holds for all lands and for 
all possible worlds. When we once find that the 
shortest distance between two points is a straight 
line we instantly see that it must be so everywhere 
and that if angels wish to take the shortest way 
home, they must fly in straight lines. When we 
prove that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 
equal to two right angles, we see that it must 
always and everywhere be so — even in a triangle 
with its apex at Arcturus and its base across the 
earth's orbit around the sun. All our sciences 
write must into all their laws, for a law is not a 
law until it carries must into all the facts with 
which It deals. And yet no person ever sees this 
fact of " must be so " with his eyes nor can he find 
it with any one of his senses. The only thing we 
can find with our senses is what actually happens, 
what is there now. We can never perceive what 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 73 

must happen. Senses can deal only with facts, 
only with is, not with must be. Must belongs in 
a deeper, invisible world where mind works and 
not eyes. For ages men wondered what held the 
earth up in space. They always looked for some 
visible support. It was a giant like Atlas who 
held it on his back, or it was a huge tortoise, or it 
was an elephant standing on another elephant, with 
elephants all the way down! But it turns out 
that nothing visible or tangible is there. The dis- 
coverers of the North and South poles found no 
real '' poles " that ran into grooves on which the 
earth spun round. There was nothing to see. 
The cable which holds the earth in space and 
swings it on its mighty annual curve is invisible 
to all eyes and yet it holds irresistibly, for the must 
of a universal law is woven into it, and the mind 
can find it though the eyes cannot. 

There is another, and a higher, kind of must 
which holds men as that force of gravitation holds 
worlds. It was one of the most august events of 
modern history when a man in the light of his own 
conscience challenged the councils and traditions 
of the Church, refused to alter the truth which his 
soul saw, and boldly declared, '' Here I stand, I 
cannot do otherwise." This is a strange thing, 
this inner '' must," this adamantine '' I cannot do 



74 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 

otherwise." It reveals a new kind of gravitation 
toward a new" kind of center, and it implies the 
existence of another sort of invisible universe in 
which we live. It often carries a person straight 
against his wishes, into hard conflict with his incli- 
nations, and it may take him up to that perilous 
edge where life itself is put at hazard. 

** Though love repine and reason chafe, 

I heard a voice without reply ; 
'Tis man's perdition to be safe 

When for the truth he ought to die." 

Some persons do not feel this irresistible pull as 
powerfully as others do, but probably nobody, who 
can be called a person, altogether escapes it. A 
little boy, in the first stages of collision between 
instinct and duty, said naively to his mother: 
*' I've got something inside me I can't do what I 
want to with! " This is exactly the truth about 
it. It holds, it says must, like the other Invisible 
reahties that build the universe. 

Different individuals feel this inner pull in dif- 
ferent ways. They read off their call to duty in 
different terms. Their must confronts them in 
unique fashion, but whenever it comes and how- 
ever it comes, it is august and moving. We no 
doubt mix some of our cruder self in it and perhaps 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 75 

we color it with the hue of our human habits, but 
at its truest and its best, it is the most glorious 
thing in our structure and it closely allies us to a 
Higher than ourselves. 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man, 
When duty whispers low, ' Thou must/ 

The youth replies, * I can.' '' 

III 
WHERE ARGUMENTS FAIL 

There are some matters, and they are just the 
most vital ones, which lie too deeply embedded in 
the sub-soil of life itself to be settled by debate. 
Coleridge was in the main right when he made the 
distinction, so famous in his religious prose writ- 
ings, between reason and understanding, or, as it 
might be put, between reason and reasoning, i. e., 
logical argument. A position may be grounded 
and established in reason and yet at the same time 
lie beyond the sphere of argumentative debate. 
The range of logical proof is notoriously limited. 
One explanation of this situation is that '^ think- 
ing," '^ reasoning," " speculation " is a late-born 
faculty and capacity. There was a time when 
there was no need for it. Instinct served every 



76 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 

purpose. Life was simple and of all things prac- 
tical. Action was the all-important thing, and 
primitive man was organized, in fact pre-organ- 
ized, to act. Thinking was a useless luxury, as 
unnecessary for the function of living as a steamer- 
trunk would have been, or a grand-square piano. 
When thinking by the use of abstract concepts did 
come into fashion, after life had gone on a long 
time without such a luxury, it helped solve some 
problems, but it worked successfully only for prob- 
lems of a limited scope. 

Long before thinking or speculation had 
achieved any marked successes, long before man 
had learned to argue for the mere fun and fascina- 
tion of the thing, that other strange trait of human 
life had flowered out — the tendency, I mean, to 
feel the worth of things, the power to appreciate 
values. This is even more distinctive of man, a 
more fundamental trait of personality, than think- 
ing or reasoning is. It was born when man was 
born — it is as immemorial as smiling or weep- 
ing. It is rooted and grounded in reason but it is 
not due to reasoning. 

By the worth or value of a deed, I mean its sig- 
nificance for the realization of the highest good of 
life. It is a sense of appreciation of what ought 
to be in order to bring life on toward its fulfillment. 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 77 

In a complex life, like ours, a person will obviously 
have many ends to live for and many scales of 
value, but gradually lesser and lower ones will fall 
into place under wider and higher ones and thus 
we form a kind of hierarchical scale of values, 
with some over-topping end of supreme worth 
dominating our life and creating our loyalties. 
We discover for Instance that life Is more than 
meat or body than raiment, that mere survival 
yields to struggle for the life of others, and that 
sometimes life must be given for something worth 
more than life. 

But, as I have said, this sense of worth Is not a 
product of reasoning. It attaches rather to the 
great Instinctive and emotional springs which 
gradually become organized through experience, 
life and action. It works as a deep-lying Inner 
ground-swell, pushing In a definite forward direc- 
tion, rather than as a logically conceived plan 
which can be settled and verified by argument. 
'' I see my way as birds their trackless way." 
The first and most fundamental law of con- 
sciousness In Its primitive stage, whether In that 
of the child or the race. Is the Inveterate tendency 
to organize activity. This principle operates be- 
fore the child begins to think or to aim at con- 
ceived ends. At the very first, Instincts are defi- 



78 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 

nite, simple ways of acting for definite simple ends. 
Then unconsciously, but with momentous results, 
the child begins to group impulses and instincts 
into systems of interest, little empires which now 
direct action. Simple functions converge into 
organizations or systems of instinct and emotion, 
or purposeful efforts. Little by little these pri- 
mary systems of action widen out, expand, enrich, 
and become informed by experience and ever after 
lie deep down at the roots or springs of will and of 
personality. From first to last our life values, our 
sense of worth, are formed and shaped in this 
deeper region below the level of conscious reflec- 
tions and reasoning. They are always operating, 
they are always playing the main part or role in 
the active drama of our life, but they seldom 
appear as actors. The sentiments, again, are only 
wider systems or groups of these springs of in- 
stinct and emotion, more or less profoundly ration- 
alized through experience, the experience of the 
individual and the race. They are among the 
most positive forces within us which move to 
action, but they lie too deeply embedded in the 
fundaments of our being to be easily recast. Per- 
sons of a certain type often sneer at '' sentiment," 
and at what they call ^' sentimental " attitudes. 
They probably refer to excessive emotional tones 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 79 

and seeming lack of rational basis. It is true no 
doubt that sentiment is sometimes thin and '' gush- 
ing." But the great sentiments which more or 
less rule our lives are immense realities to be reck- 
oned with. They are the widest and most inclu- 
sive organized systems of action operative in our 
lives. They furnish us with our supreme values. 
They move, like great subterranean ocean currents, 
through all the activities of our being. In them 
all our loyalties are born and by them are en- 
larged and enriched. Love, patriotism, devotion 
to truth, aesthetic appreciation, passion for good- 
ness, religion in all its range and heights, are such 
sentiments. They represent the organization of 
many instincts, emotions and attitudes, unified, 
fused together and sublimated by reason. They 
give meaning and value to things we care for. 
They determine our pursuits. They kindle our 
loyalty. They gird us and carry us forward to 
our various goals. Arguments change our intel- 
lectual conclusions and affect our decisions in many 
spheres, but they do not often reach this more cen- 
tral region where we live and have our being. 
The great loyalties are only slightly touched by 
logic. They lie deeper down in the slowly formed 
systems of instinct, emotion and will, where our 
estimates of values are created. We do not expect 



8o THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 

to be asked why we love our child, we do not rise 
to explain why we are ready to suffer for truth, we 
do not give any rationalistic account of devotion 
to country or of dedication to God. They seem 
to us inevitable and self-explanatory. 

What will eventually rise to the apex of a per- 
son's hierarchy of values cannot well be predicted. 
Here men differ. There is no absolute arbiter of 
values. Should Galileo put devotion to truth 
above loyalty to his Church or not? Does one's 
moral obligation outrank the requirements of 
love? How do the claims of country take grade 
with the soul's interior conviction of what is due 
to God? The answers vary. But one's course 
here is not settled by debate. Some overtopping 
loyalty rises in us and holds us as invisible gravita- 
tion holds the earth in its orbit. Our ideals, our 
convictions, our elemental faiths root back into 
the lives of ancestors and martyrs. They were 
builded into our lives along with the alphabet. 
They have silently grown and twined into the in- 
most fiber of our being, and out of these deep roots 
of life one's supreme loyalty flowers forth. It is 
very solemn and sacred business. In the hour of 
crisis the sincere, honest person feels as he makes 
his choice, amid the conflicting issues, that he can- 
not do otherwise. To make a different decision, 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 8i 

he would need not a new argument, but a change 
of personality, an alteration of all the values of 
life. 

IV 

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 

One of the ultimate problems of ethics is the 
problem of moral authority. From whence comes 
the moral imperative ? What is the origin of that 
august thing we call *' obligation " ? Who lays 
upon us the unescapable " thou must," or '* I can- 
not do otherwise "? 

In the early stages of the moral life, whether in 
the case of the child or of the race, duty seems to 
come from beyond, from outside. It is something 
imposed by a foreign will. It is not yet something 
self-chosen, or loved for its own sake ; it is some- 
thing stern and harsh and forbidding which lies 
like a specter across one's path, asking to be done, 
and it is backed and buttressed by a sense of fear. 
The will that enjoins it has the dread power to 
enforce it, and dire results will follow if one runs 
away from duty or takes a shun-pike around it. 
This is the legalistic stage of ethics, which has had 
an enormous part to play in the discipline of the 
child and of the race, and which lingers on as a 



82 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 

relic or survival in the maturer life of multitudes 
of people. Duty at this stage is always character- 
istically negative in its form. It limits, restrains, 
and restricts. It confronts individual impulse 
with an authoritative command which says: 
'' Thou shalt not." It is a stage of life which di- 
vides persons into two absolutely sundered classes 
— the sheep and the goats, i.e., those who say 
" yes," and those who say " no " to the enjoined 
law of righteousness. 

But however important this moral stage of life 
is, it is not yet the goal of ethical personal good- 
ness. No person is good, in the highest and rich- 
est sense, until he chooses to perform his deed be- 
cause he feels its inherent worth as an aim of life, 
and selects it because he knows that it is a good 
act to put a life into. It is thus self-chosen, no 
longer a thing of foreign compulsion, and yet the 
compulsion and the authority remain as real and 
as august as ever. 

The slow and gradual heightening of the ethical 
life, as it passes over from external authority, to 
internal, from negation to affirmation, from fear 
to joy, is one of the most splendid stories of human 
life. Little by little one discovers, as he lives and 
sees deeper into the meaning of things, that a life 
of duty is a life of largeness and freedom. 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 83 

There would be no richness, no content, to a life 
that answered no calls of duty, a life that remained 
shut up in its own self. The only way to fulfill 
one's life is to forget about it and become absorbed 
in something beyond it, to take up a task which 
thrusts itself in the way, and to do it. After each 
such deed the doer discovers that, without aiming 
for this result, he himself has been enlarged and 
enriched by it. He has been more than conqueror. 
He is now himself plus the deed he has done. In 
doing his duty he has found himself. In the path 
of duty and in the way of obligation lies the road 
to the true realization of life and of its meaning, 
and in this vision love casts out fear, and joy sup- 
plants dread. 

But if duty is not now Imposed as an external 
law and is not laid on us by a foreign will which we 
must obey or take the dread consequences, where 
does the call come from, and why is it so august, 
compelling and authoritative ? What, in a word, 
makes duty duty and why do we follow its call 
as though we could not do otherwise ? 

The answer, as I see the matter, is this: A 
mature moral man's duty rests for him on a clear 
personal insight, or vision, of the course which 
fits his life. It will be of necessity an action for 
the sake of an ideal, for action along the line of 



84 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 

instinct, i. e., along a line of least resistance, would 
not be called duty. It will not be an action for the 
sake of pleasure, nor will it be taken in order to 
forward self-interest, for acts of that nature are 
acts which do not bear the brand and mark of obli- 
gation. All our obligations are born out of our 
relationship with others. The very word obliga- 
tion means " tied-in " or *' tied together." As 
soon as we realize what fellowship means we 
awake to duties and we discover that we cannot 
follow any easy primrose path that ends in self. 
Duty is always done for a larger whole than one's 
own me; it therefore always does come from be- 
yond, and it seems, thus, even in its highest reaches, 
to be laid upon one from without. 

We are for purposes of life, bound in, not only 
with those who now live and who form our visible 
society, but we are bound in as well with those who 
were before us and with those who will be after 
us. Our lives are never isolated, except in mental 
abstraction, but we are in living fact conjunct with 
a vast social environment which shapes all our 
action and from which we draw all our ideals. 

We catch our visions of life in a very especial 
way from the persons who are our heroes and 
models, or the persons who have in some way won 
in our thought a prestige and for that reason get 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 85 

from us unconscious and joyous imitation. Living 
in admiration, as we do, of Christ, and loving him 
as we must, if we see what he was and what he 
did for us, we cannot help coming into life-contact 
and relationship with him, and in some sense his 
ideals become ours and his outlook on the world 
and his desire for an altered humanity possess us 
and control us and unite us in one larger whole 
with him, till we believe in his belief and leap in 
some measure to his height of living. 

When in this intimate and inner way he be- 
comes our leader we are no longer our mere selves. 
We cannot live now for pleasure or for gain or 
for self. His will becomes in some degree our 
will, and we go his way — not because somebody 
or some book forbids us to do otherwise, but be- 
cause love constrains us and a higher vision of an 
ideal world compels us. This attitude, which 
holds one fast as adamant to hard and difficult 
duty. Is not irrational but, when life is conceived 
in its wholeness, is gloriously rational. It is 
an attitude, however, which often perhaps is 
not arrived at by clear and linked steps of 
reasoning. 

But though not articulately reasoned out, in- 
sights of this moral type may be as rational as 
the clearest logic. No one probably ever comes 



86 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 

to a decision to sacrifice his life for a cause or for 
a truth by the mere persuasion of logic. The 
heroes who died at Thermopylae could not have 
'' explained " the grounds of their decision. They 
followed an insight which was born out of their 
relation to a country and they could not do other- 
wise. If instead of having Sparta for their loved 
cause they had been bound into life with the 
Founder of the Kingdom of God their whole atti- 
tude would have altered. They would have 
leaped to the sacrifice with the same eager joy, but 
it would now have been a sacrifice of self to pre- 
serve and guard the principle on which the king- 
dom exists and grows — the principle of love, and 
that would be as rational as the other act actually 
was. 

Sacrifice of self is a feature of all rich and pur- 
poseful life. The moment a person cares in- 
tensely for ideals he has started on a way of life 
that makes great demands and yet it is also a way 
of great joy. Nobody who knows would ever 
prefer the way of ease and quick reward. The 
law of the survival of the fittest throws no light 
here. '' The will to live," or *' the will to power," 
goes only a little way as an explanation of the 
processes of life. From somewhere a loyalty to 



Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 87 

ends that are not of self has got into our human 
fiber, and we cannot live without obeying that 
loyalty to the ideal even though it cost all we have 
and all we are. 



CHAPTER V 

THE GREAT VENTURE 

I 

CONCERNING IMMORTALITY 

We have heard very much of the problems con- 
cerning prayer during these years — how long 
they seem ! • — ■ since the war broke in upon our old 
arrangements, and another problem has become 
perhaps still more pressing — that of immortality. 

The awed spirit holds its breath 
Blown over by a wind of death. 

We have been living face to face with stagger- 
ing conditions, and we have been closer neighbors 
to death than has ever been the case before since 
there were men. We have been forced to ask 
over again the immemorial questions of the human 
race and more urgently than ever the question 
which sooner or later every man asks of himself, 
'' Do my loved and lost still live in another sphere ; 
shall we find each other again, and will there be a 
real fulfillment and consummation of this incom- 

88 



Ch. V] THE GREAT VENTURE 89 

plete and fragmentary earthly career?" No 
absolute answer can yet be given to that palpitat- 
ing human question, though some genuine illumi- 
nation relieves the otherwise appalling darkness. 
For many — in fact, for multitudes ■ — the Easter 
message of the gospel is all that is needed. It is 
a pillar of hope and a ground of faith. It closes 
the issue and settles all doubt. 

But in a world which has proved to be in the 
main rationally ordered and marvelously suscept- 
ible to scientific treatment, we should expect to 
find in the natural order of things some sort of 
rational evidence that the highest moral and 
spiritual values of life are conserved. Those of 
us who have been accustomed to knock at the doors 
of the universe for answers to our earnest ques- 
tions can hardly help expecting nature to respond 
in some adequate way to this most urgent quest of 
ours. It is this rational quest of which I propose 
saying a few words. 

There have been in the past, and there still are, 
two quite different ways of approaching the ques- 
tion of survival on rational grounds. We can 
pursue the method which is usually called empiri- 
cal, or we can follow out the implications of the 
ethical life. The first method deals with the 
observable facts on which belief In survival rests. 



90 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. V 

In the primitive and rudimentary stage of the race 
dream experiences had important influence on the 
formation of man's ideas about the unseen world. 
In his sleep he saw again those who had vanished 
from his sight. His dead father appeared to 
him, talked with him, and even joined him in the 
chase. It was, however, a world quite different 
from the world of his waking senses. It was not 
a world which he could show to his neighbor, nor 
did it have the same rigid, solid, verifiable char- 
acteristics as did his outer world. It was a 
ghostly world with shadelike inhabitants. It was 
not a radiant and sunlit realm; it was dull and un- 
lovely. But in any case most races reacting on 
dreams, and probably on even more impressive 
psychic experiences, arrived at a settled convic- 
tion that life of some sort went on in some kind 
of other world. The mythologies of the poetic 
races are full of pictures and stories expanded out 
of racial experiences. These psychic experiences 
have continued through all human history, and a 
large body of facts has slowly accumulated. In 
recent years the automatic writing and the auto- 
matic speaking of psychically endowed persons 
have furnished a mass of interesting material 
which can be dealt with systematically and scien- 
tifically. 



Ch. V] THE GREAT VENTURE 91 

It is too soon, however, to build any definite 
hopes on this empirical evidence. There can be 
no question that some of the reports which come 
from these '' sensitives " — these psychically en- 
dowed persons — appear, to an unskeptically 
minded reader of them, to be real communications 
from persons in another world or, at least, in an- 
other part of our world. This is nevertheless a 
hasty conclusion. It may be true, but it is not the 
only possible conclusion that can be drawn from 
the facts. It is a mistake at this stage of our 
knowledge to talk of '' scientific " evidence of 
survival. All that we are warranted in saying is 
that there are many cumulative facts which may 
eventually furnish solid empirical evidence that 
what we call death does not end personal life. 
But at its best the empirical approach seems to me 
an unsatisfactory way to deal with this problem. 
I should feel the same way about empirical tests 
of prayer. They do not meet the case. The real 
issue reaches deeper. We shall, of course, wel- 
come everything which adds to our assurance, but 
I, for one, prefer to rest my faith on other grounds 
than these empirical ones. 

Far back in the history of the race prophets ap- 
peared who inaugurated a new way of solving 
human problems. They discovered that man's 



92 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. V 

life is vastly greater and richer than he usually 
knows. There is something in him which he can- 
not explain nor account for, something which over- 
flows and transcends his practical, utilitarian needs 
and requirements. He feels himself allied with a 
greater than himself, and his thoughts range be- 
yond all finite margins. Eternity seems to belong 
to his nature. He cannot adjust himself to limits 
either of time or of space. These prophets of the 
souFs deeper nature, especially those in Greece, 
Socrates and Plato for instance, insisted that there 
must be a world of transcending reality which fits 
this depth of life in us. The moral and spiritual 
nature of man is itself prophetic of a larger realm 
of life which corresponds with this inexhaustible 
creative inner life. With this moral insight, im- 
mortality took on new meaning and new value. 
The life after death was no longer thought of as 
a dim, shadowy, ghostlike thing, to be dreaded 
rather than desired. It was now thought of as 
the real life for which this life was only a prepara- 
tory stage. Steadily this view of the great ethical 
prophets has gained its place in the thought of 
men, and the mythology based on dreams and 
psychical experiences has in measure lost its hold 
on those who think deeply. 

It seems impossible to consider life — life in its 



Ch. V] THE GREAT VENTURE 93 

highest ranges in the form of ethical and spiritual 
personality — as a rational and significant affair 
unless it is an endlessly unfolding thing which con- 
serves its gains and carries them cumulatively for- 
ward to ever-increasing issues. A universe which 
squanders persons, who have hopes and faiths and 
aspirations like ours, as it squanders its midges and 
its sea-spawn cannot be an ethical universe, what- 
ever else it may be. It must have some larger 
sphere for us, it must guard this most precious 
thing for which the rest of the universe seems to 
be made. The answer to the question rests in the 
last resort in a still deeper question. Is there a 
Person or a Superperson at the heart of things, 
who really cares, who is pledged to make the uni- 
verse come out right, who wills forevermore the 
triumph of goodness — in short, who guards and 
guarantees the rationality and moral significance of 
the universe? If there is such a Person, immor- 
tality seems to me assured. If there is not — 
well, then the whole stupendous pile of atoms is 
'* an insane sandheap." That way madness lies. 
It simply is not thinkable. 

But from the nature of the case these supreme 
truths of our spiritual life and of our deeper uni- 
verse cannot be proved as we prove the facts of 
sense or the mathematical relations of space. 



94 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. V 

The moral and spiritual person must always go 
out to his life-issues as Abraham went out from 
Ur of the Chaldees, without '^ knowing" whither 
he is going. The moral discipline, the spiritual 
training of the soul, seems to demand venture, 
risk, the will to obey the lead of vision, faith in the 
prophetic nature of the inner self, confidence in 
" the soul's invincible surmise." I, for one, pre- 
fer the venture to empirical certainty. I should 
rather risk my soul on my inner faith than to have 
the kind of proof of survival that is available. 
What we have is so great, so precious, so loaded 
with prophecy of fulfillment, that I am ready to 
join the father of those who live by faith and to 
swing out on that last momentous voyage, not 
knowing altogether whither I am going, but sure 
of God and convinced that 

What is excellent, as God lives, 
Is permanent. 



II 

THE MIRACLE AGAIN 

There are many things In this world, crowded 
with mysteries as it is, which impress us with awe 
and wonder. 



Ch. V] THE GREAT VENTURE 95 

Luther, at one of the most trying and discourag- 
ing periods of his life, wrote to a friend: 

" I have recently seen two miracles. The first was 
that, as I looked out of my window, I saw the stars 
and the sky and the whole vault of heaven, with no pillars 
to support it; and yet the sky did not fall, and the vault 
remained fast. But there are some who want to see the 
pillars and would like to clasp and feel them. And when 
they are unable to do so they fidget and tremble as if the 
sky would certainly fall in. . . . Again, I saw great, 
thick clouds roll above us, so heavy that they looked like 
great seas, and I saw no ground on which they could rest 
nor any barrels to hold them, and yet they fell not on 
us, but threatened us and floated on. When they had 
passed by, the rainbow shone forth, the rainbow which 
was the floor that held them up. It is such a weak and 
thin little floor and roof that it was almost lost in the 
clouds, and looked more like a ray coming through a 
stained glass window than like a strong floor, so that it J 
was as marvelous as the weight of the clouds. It actually 
happened that this seemingly frail shadow held up the 
weight of water and protected us. But some people look 
at the thickness of the cloud and the thinness of the ray, 
and they fear and worry." 

Another great man who lived more than two 
hundred years after Luther, Immanuel Kant, used 
to say: "Two things fill me with unutterable 
awe, the silent stars above me and the moral law 
within me " ; and most thoughtful persons must 



96 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. V 

have felt this speechless awe, I am sure, as they 
have looked up and looked within. But there is 
one thing which fills me with profounder wonder 
than Luther's rainbow bridge or Kant's silent stars, 
and that is the reawakening of the world in spring- 
time. It seems some of these mornings almost as 
though we might hear the sons of God once more 
shouting for joy as they behold the new miracle 
of re-creation going on. If we were not dulled 
by habit and made callous by seeing the miracle 
repeated, we should look upon this new stream of 
life with those large eyes of wonder with which 
the first Adam saw his fresh-made world. I am 
not surprised that men in all ages have taken this 
rebirth of the world in spring as a parable of a 
deeper rebirth. Long before there was a Chris- 
tian Easter, with its symbols of flowers and eggs, 
men celebrated the opening of the flowers and the 
hatching of the eggs because they saw in these 
events a gateway into a deeper mystery and were 
touched with wonder as to whether the soul might 
not also have its reawakening and its new career 
of life. That Power that guides the unfolding of 
the acorn and pushes up the oak, that Mind that 
brings the gorgeous butterfly out of the dull 
cocoon and raises it to its new and winged career, 
may well know how to '' swallow up mortality 



Ch. V] THE GREAT VENTURE 97 

with life " and bring us and ours to a higher stage 
of being. This new and greater miracle of an- 
other life beyond does not stagger us much after 
we have fully entered into the wonder of the \ 
spring. It is no more difficult to carry a soul 
safely over the bridge of death into the light and 
joy of a new world than it is to make a spring 
dandelion out of one of those strange winged seeds 
which a child carelessly blew away last summer. 
But here is the dandelion. It is " common " 
enough. We hardly stop to look down into its 
yellow face or to meditate on the wonder of its 
arrival over the narrow bridge of that flying seed. 
But if we could penetrate all its mysteries, could 
know it root and all and all in all, we could see 
through all the mysteries there are, and we should 
find it easy to say: '' I believe in the resurrection 
from the dead, and in the life everlasting." 

As far as we are able to discover, the soul pos- \ 
sesses infinite capacity. A blossom may reach its 
perfection in a day, but no one has fathomed the 
possibilities of a human heart. Eternity is not 
too vast for a soul to grow in, if the soul wills to 
grow. Why, then, should such a being come and 
learn the meaning of duty, loyalty, sympathy, 
trust, and the other spiritual qualities, only to pass 
as a shadow? My answer is the one Browning 



98 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. V 

has given, that '' life is just a stuff to try the soul's 
strength on." 

*' If a man die, shall he live again? '* Our 
heart as well as our head seeks an answer. Know- 
ing that such a hope is reasonable is not enough ; 
we wish to feel that it is true. Here again God 
meets us, not only with an outward promise, or 
through the voices of nature, but with an inward 
conviction born of acquaintance with himself. 
We hear the answer when we first find him, but it 
grows as we learn to know him better. This is 
the apostle's assurance: '' I know whom I have 
believed, and I am persuaded that he Is able to 
keep that which I have committed unto him 
against that day." " Learn of me," said the Mas- 
ter, " and ye shall find rest unto your souls." 
Yes, in this experience we even cease questioning. 
We know him and we trust. On his love we rest. 
Why should we reckon with the grave? Our 
Father this side shall be our Father beyond. We 
are trusting him here ; we can trust him there. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 

I 

PRAYER AS AN ENERGY OF LIFE 

Clement of Alexandria many centuries ago 
thought of prayer as " a mutual and reciprocal 
correspondence " or " inward converse with God/' 
For this great Christian teacher prayer was not a 
solitary, one-sided act. It was a two-sided inter- 
course, a reciprocal correspondence, a real respon- 
sive relationship. This two-sided aspect has been 
recognized through all the centuries as an essen- 
tial characteristic of genuine prayer. V^illiam 
James is expressing what most serious-minded men 
think when he says that religion would turn out to 
be illusory if there were no such thing as real, 
mutual, active intercourse between the human soul 
and God; if, as he declares, the intercourse be not 
effective; '' if it be not a give and take relation; if 
nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the 
world is in no whit different for its having taken 

99 



loo THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

place." ^ In dealing for the present in this chap- 
ter with the psychological fact that prayer is dyna- 
mic, I. e., an interior heightening energy, I do not 
want any reader to assume that I am surrendering 
that other fact, equally essential to all real prayer, 
namely, that it is a mutual, two-sided correspond- 
ence. 

It must, too, be taken for granted that prayer, 
true effectual prayer, has a range of influence far 
beyond the personal life of the one who prays. 
No person is ever isolated, unrelated and alone. 
He is bound in with the lives of a living group, 
an inseparable member of an organic fellowship. 
No man liveth unto himself, no man dieth unto 
himself and no man prays resultfully for himself 
alone. What we are and what we do flow out and 
help to determine what others shall be and shall 
do, and even so in the highest spiritual operations 
and activities of the soul we contribute some part 
toward the formation of the spiritual atmosphere 
in which others are to live and we help to release 
currents of spiritual energy for others than our- 
selves. If we belong, as I believe we do, in a real 
kingdom of God — an organic fellowship of inter- 
related lives — prayer should be as effective a 
force In this Inter-related social world of ours as 

1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 465. 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE loi 

gravitation is in the world of matter. Personal 
spirits experience spiritual gravitation, soul 
reaches after soul, hearts draw toward each other. 
W^e are no longer in the net of blind fate, in th^j 
realm of impersonal force — we are in a love- 
system where the aspiration of one member height- 
ens the entire group, and the need of one — even 
the least — draws upon the resources of the whole 
— even the Infinite. We are in actual Divine- 
human fellowship. 

The only obstacle to effectual praying, in this 
world of spiritual fellowship, would be individual 
selfishness. To want to get just for one's own 
self, to ask for something which brings loss and 
injury to others, would be to sever one's self from 
the source of blessings, and to lose not only the 
thing sought, but to lose, as well, one's very self. 

This principle is true anywhere, even in ordi- 
nary human friendship. It is true, too. In art and 
in music. The artist may not force some personal 
caprice into his creation. He must make himself 
the organ of a universal reality which is beautiful, 
not simply for this man or that, but for man as 
man. If there Is, as I believe, an inner kingdom 
of spirit, a kingdom of love and fellowship, then 
it is a fact that a tiny being like one of us can 
impress and influence the Divine Heart, and we 



I02 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

can make our personal contribution to the Will of 
the universe, but we can do it only by wanting what 
everybody can share, and by seeking blessings 
which have a universal implication. 

I am dealing, it must be remembered, with the 
dynamic aspect of prayer. Prayer releases energy 
as certainly as the closing of an electric circuit 
does. It heightens all human capacities. It 
refreshes and quickens life. It unlocks reservoirs 
of power. It opens invisible doors into new 
storehouses of spiritual force for the person to live 
by, and, as I believe, for others to live by as well. 
It is effective and operative as surely as are the 
forces of steam and gravitation. 

The recent important psychological studies of 
prayer all agree in this one point, that most per- 
sons while engaged in earnest, sincere prayer feel 
an inflow or invasion of greater power than they 
were conscious of before they prayed, and Chris- 
tians of all types and communions, of all lands and 
of all periods, unite in bearing testimony to this 
truth. '' Energy," as William James says, 
'* which hut for prayer would he hound, is hy 
prayer set free and operates/^ 

Frederick Myers was drawing upon his own ex- 
perience when he wrote : '' Our spirits are sup- 
ported by a perpetual indrawal of energy and the 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 103 

vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing. 
. . . Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much 
spiritual life as possible and we must place our 
minds in any attitude which experience shows to 
be favorable to such indrawal. Prayer is the gen- 
eral name for that attitude of open and earnest 
expectancy." 

There can be no question that all effective 
dynamic prayer rises out of living faith. A person 
cannot let himself go and pour out his soul as he 
knocks at the great doors of the divine world un- 
less he believes that there is a divine world that 
will be reached by his cry of need. W^e hear much 
talk In these days of the subjective character of 
prayer, but you cannot cut the subjective aspect of 
prayer away from the objective aspect and keep 
the former a thing of value and power by itself 
any more than you can cut the convex side of a 
curve away from the concave side and keep either 
a reality by itself alone. In order to have subjec- 
tive results there must be live faith in an objec- 
tive reality. A person cannot in this present 
world of gravitation lift himself by his belt or by 
his boot-straps, nor can he any more easily, in the 
Inner world of spiritual facts, lift himself or others 
out of sin or sorrow or loneliness or failure or lit- 
tleness by subjective strivings which attach to no 



I04 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

objective support beyond the margin of his own 
personal area. The moment the objective side 
drops out or is assumed to be illusory, the mo- 
ment we convince ourselves that our Great Com- 
panion is only a dream of our own, we immediately 
fail to get dynamic effects from our subjective 
strivings. Brother Lawrence was right when he 
said: '' It is into the soul permeated with living 
faith that God pours his graces and his favors 
plenteously. Into the soul they flow like an im- 
petuous torrent, when it finds a passage for its pent 
up flood after being dammed back from its ordi- 
nary course by some obstacle." 

We cannot live constructively toward any end 
of life as our operative goal or ideal until we can 
make that goal or ideal seem real to ourselves. 
It must not be vain or illusory if it is to hold us 
fixed and pointed toward it. It must not seem to 
us a will-o'-the-wisp, a mirage, if it is to control 
us and steer us forward through the storms and 
waterspouts of life. We build our lives by visions 
of real goals that are worth our venture and only 
so can we rise above the level of instinct, the dull 
bread-and-butter life. But what is true here in 
the field of ethics is also true in the realm of 
prayer. We must have faith in the Beyond. We 
need not wait until we can demonstrate the cer- 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 105 

tainty of what the far-reaching tentacles of our 
heart feel to be real, but at least we must have a 
souPs vision of a More Than Ourselves to whom 
we turn, on whom we rely and from whom we 
expect what we need for ourselves and others to 
live by. The wonderful praying of the great mys- 
tics is due to their wonderful faith. They get 
what they seek because they expect to get it. 
They absolutely trust the far-flung tentacles of 
their soul. One of our American poets who was 
himself a mystic has well expressed this venture of 
" the soul's filament," the flinging forth of *' the 
ductile anchor." 

" A noiseless, patient spider, 

I marked, where, on a little promontory, it stood isolated ; 
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding. 
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of 

itself. 
Ever unreeling them — ever tirelessly speeding them. 

" And you, O my Soul, where you stand. 
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space. 
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, — seeking the 

spheres to connect them ; 
Till the bridge you will need, be form'd — till the ductile 

anchor hold ; 
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O 

my Soul.'' 



io6 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

Saint Teresa in a multitude of passages describ- 
ing her experience of the effect of prayer always 
ascribes the reflex power to her own consciousness 
or feeling of the presence of God upon whom she 
throws herself. '' I could," she says, *' in no wise 
doubt, either that he was in me or that I was 
absorbed in him." I kept full of the thought of 
the presence of God, she says in substance. I la- 
bored to remove every thought of bodily objects 
and set myself to be recollected before him. I 
feel, she continues, a very deep conviction that 
God is with me when I pray and I see, too, that I 
grow stronger and better thereby. 

Our surface life of effort and conscious striving 
is split up into many fragmentary aims and into 
many conflicting activities. We are carried about 
by shifting winds and by the drive of cross-cur- 
rents. When we '' return home," as the mystics 
say, to our deeper self and enter into our inner 
sanctuary we are borne along and unified by one 
great ground-swell longing for the life that is Life. 
We fall away from and lose our little self — our 
selfish self — and find a deep-lying conjunct or 
comprehensive self that is always more than we. 
In these truest moments of prayer a man comes 
upon that rock-bottom experience which a great 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 107 

ancient soul had met when he said: ''Under- 
neath are the everlasting arms." 

The unification of the usually scattered forces 
of our inner self, the concentration of all our pow- 
ers toward one perfect end, the focussing of the 
soul's aspiration and loyalty upon one central real- 
ity that is adequate for us, the surrender of our 
own will to a holier and mightier will, produce just 
the inner conditions that are essential for the 
flooding in of spiritual energy, and for the release 
of it for others who are in need of it. Everybody 
knows what it is suddenly to lose all fears and 
fear-thoughts that have obsessed one and to rise 
up with courage to face the tasks that are waiting 
to be done. We have all some time seen the shad- 
ows flee away or we have seen them pierced by a 
light that obliterated the shadow and left us in 
possession of insight and a forward looking atti- 
tude which conquered the difficulty in advance. 
The literature of conversion is full of records of 
men and women, beaten and defeated, suddenly 
lifted to new levels of experience, put in reach of 
transforming forces, flooded with transfiguring 
light, convinced of new possibilities and becoming 
in the strength of the experience '' twice-born " 
persons. When I speak of " unification " and 



io8 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

*' concentration " I do not mean that they are the 
result of conscious effort. Quite the opposite is 
generally the case. There is no thought of what 
is happening to one's self in genuine prayer. The 
worshiper is utterly absorbed with God and with 
the joy and wonder of his Presence, and thus the 
usual strain and tension of thought fall away as 
they do also in the presence of an object of perfect 
beauty or when one is listening to great music. 
Just that cessation of conscious direction, that 
absence of conscious effort is probably the best 
way to secure the release of hidden energies within 
the subconscious life. Even the physical attitude 
of prayer, the release of all muscle strain in the 
eyes, the momentary exclusion of the whole sensi- 
ble universe from the field of consciousness assist 
the worshiper to relax, to let go of time and space 
and to break through into the region where fresh 
currents of life are stored and circulate. Richard 
Cabot is undoubtedly right when he says in his 
splendid book. What Men hive By, that prayer 
fulfills what play and art and love attempt. It 
heightens, as those other higher attitudes and ac- 
tivities of life do, all our forces; it fortifies and re- 
integrates the self, restores the depleted energies, 
orientates us when we are lost, confused, or per- 
plexed and it renews and heartens the soul, as sleep 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 109 

does the body. Prayer is beyond question an 
energy-releasing function of life. It is as impor- 
tant for the health of the soul as exercise is for 
the body or as the fresh search after truth is for 
the mind. 

One of the most interesting and valuable testi- 
monies to the dynamic and curative character of 
the prayer of faith is that given by Dr. Theodore 
Hyslop, a specialist of great reputation in the 
treatment of mental diseases. Speaking at the 
annual meeting of the British Medical Association 
in 1905, he said: — 

** As an alienist and one whose whole life has been 
concerned with the sufferings of the mind, I would state 
that of all hygienic measures to counteract disturbed 
sleep, depressed spirits, and all the miserable sequels of 
a distressed mind, I would undoubtedly give the first 
place to the simple habit of prayer. . • . Let there but 
be a habit of nightly communion, not as a mendicant or 
repeater of words more adapted to the tongue of a sage, 
but as a humble individual who submerges or asserts his 
individuality as an integral part of a greater whole. 
Such a habit does more to clean the spirit and strengthen 
the soul to overcome mere incidental emotionalism than 
any other therapeutic agent known to me. ... I 
believe it to be our object, as teachers and physicians, 
to fight against all those influences which tend to produce 
either religious intemperance or indifference, and to 
subscribe, as best we may, to that form of religious belief, 



no THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

so far as we can find it practically embodied or effective, 
which believes in ' the larger hope.' " 

This is undoubtedly the case and It would not 
be difficult to gather a very large amount of con- 
crete testimony to the reflex power of prayer upon 
the person praying. One of Professor James B. 
Pratt's correspondents declares that, although he 
is predominantly skeptical, at rare intervals he 
*' stops fighting " and '^ relies on assistance," and 
he adds that at such moments he experiences 
*' something like a movement of God " toward 
him. He feels " an immediate response." The 
result is *' Immediate quieting of the nerves " and 
the mental result Is a reenforcement of courage. 
An anonymous writer In the New York '' Out- 
look " a few years ago gave an Impressive account 
of his own personal experience. He tells how 
again and again in moments of supreme doubt, 
disappointment, discouragement, or unhapplness 
a prayer uttered In faith has been followed by 
'' quick and astonishing relief." He says: 

'* Sometimes doubt has been transformed into confident 
assurance, mental weakness utterly routed by strength, 
self-distrust changed into self-confidence, fear into 
courage, dismay into confident and brightest hope. 

" These transitions have sometimes come by degrees 
-—in the course, let us say, of an hour or two; at other 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE iii 

times they have been instantaneous, flashing up in brain 
and heart as if a powerful electric stroke had cleared the 
air, even as a lightning flash will dispel the darkness of 
densest midnight, or clear away grandly the murkiness of 
sultry August debilitation. 

'' These experiences have been marked in the very 
ratio of the emergency which occasioned the utterance 
of the prayer. Over and over again, they have come 
with such unexpected quickness and power that in jus- 
tice to myself I could but rush to transcribe them, that 
in future times of distress I should have them to recur to. 
So marked have they been at times that I could simply 
say to myself, in a tumult of gladness, * The age of 
miracles has by no means passed.' They have been fol- 
lowed often by a new outward buoyancy of spirit, even 
in those critical hours in which outwardly there was the 
greatest cause for a very different frame of mind. They 
have helped me through periods of bodily sickness, coming 
like great, glad breaths of fresh air after the smothering 
influence of an atmosphere charged with what was nox- 
ious." 

The actual '* law " by which such things happen 
so far escapes us. We know that there are reser- 
voirs of energy waiting to be tapped and drawn 
upon, but for the most part we trudge our dusty 
highway and do not unlock the hidden door. W^e 
sometimes seal up the door and live on almost 
entirely forgetful and utterly unconscious of how 
near we are to help. '' There are," as James 



112 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

forcibly says, " In every one potential forms of 
activity that are shunted out from use. Part of 
the imperfect vitality under which we labor can 
thus be easily explained. One part of our mind 
dams up — even damns up! — the other parts." 
But to most of us who pray the door does some- 
times open into larger, divine life and the strength 
floods back into us. Our judgment is clarified, 
our power to endure '* the thorn in the flesh," or 
the crushing loss or the terrible separation is im- 
mensely enlarged, our resistance to subtle tempta- 
tions is backed by unexpected aid, our conquest of 
pettiness and Irritation becomes an easy matter 
and all our more ideal traits, for the time being, 
get their chance to come into full play. Ex- 
hausted, gone stale, fatigued with the strain and 
stress of standing the '' weary weight of all this 
unintelligible world " we suddenly feel *' the 
voiceless powers " of life flowing round our tired 
soul, reenforcements arriving to augment us and 
peace and love coming to blossom as though the 
climate of a divine world had flooded us with its 
spring. 

" How entered, by what secret stair 

I know not, knowing only He is there." 

And what I have said of the inner transformation 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 113 

through prayer is also true of the intercessory 
effect of prayer. In this world of inter-related 
lives one of us can ^' send his soul out " for the 
sake of others and the far-reaching results of 
such prayer are beyond question. 

Pentecost is not a thing of the almanac. It is 
not alone an event of antiquity in an upper room 
in Jerusalem. It is the high-tide experience of 
this consciousness of inrushing life and power. 
Something like it has happened often to men who 
were not apostles. These men " of one accord 
in one place " pushed back a door and the flood 
swept in — '' the Holy Ghost fell upon them." 
So, too, in all ages streams from the Beyond flow 
in when the door is really flung open, and men 
say even to-day that the Holy Ghost is an experi- 
ence. 

Prayer, real prayer, does " make a difference." 
Power to live by comes through this immemorial 
act of the soul. The discovery that we are in a 
world of law does not alter the fact. The irre- 
sistible evidence that the realm of nature is a realm 
where causation holds sway need not disturb us. 
Law and causation no more interfere with prayer 
than they do with love or with beauty. James 
Martineau has finely dealt with this point and 
his words are appropriate here. He says — 



114 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

*^ God's rule of action in nature we have every reason 
to regard as unalterable; established as an inflexible and 
faithful basis of expectation; and, for that reason, not 
open to perpetual variation on the suggestion of occa- 
sional moral contingencies. God, however, is infinite, 
and the laws of nature do not exhaust his agency. There 
is a boundless residue of disengaged faculty beyond. Be- 
hind and amid all these punctualities of law abides, in 
infinite remainder, the^ living and unpledged spirit. 
Here he has made no rule but the everlasting rule of 
holiness, and written no pledge but the pledge of in- 
extinguishable love; hence, without violated rule, he can 
individualize his regards; enter with gentle help; and 
while keeping faith with the universe, knock at the gate of 
every lonely heart." 

There is no solid hindrance to prayer except 
ourselves. We ourselves raise the barriers and 
set up the obstacles. Still as of old the soul 
finds what it undividedly seeks, it gets what it 
persistently asks for, it brings open the door at 
which it unremittingly knocks. Everywhere in 
the universe the soul may have what it wants. 
If it hungers and thirsts for God, it will be fed 
with the bread of life and supplied with the wa- 
ter that satisfies. The difliculty is not objective; 
it is subjective. We so often do not really pray. 
We only say over words and call it '' prayer." 
Let us instead learn to pray. 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 115 

" I that still pray at morning and at eve, 
Loving those roots that feed us from the past, 
And prizing more than Plato things I learned 
At that best Academe, a mother's knee, 
Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed. 
Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have felt 
That perfect disenthralment which is God'' 

II 
PRAYER AND REFLECTION 

There are multitudes of life functions which 
are simple enough and easy and natural, until we 
ask how or why we do them. They go on all 
right until reflection upsets them ! I imagine the 
bird's homing instinct would be palsied if the 
bird reflected. 

Not long ago, just at evening dusk, I heard a 
*' honk-honk " in the air almost over my head. I 
knew at once what it meant — the wild geese fly- 
ing by. Old memories came rushing back and 
with the enthusiasm of a child I ran out into the 
field to see the well-known V, with its leadpr at 
the angle, wheeling south. The thin fringes of 
ice on the northern lakes had warned them of 
coming trouble, and obedient to instinct they had 
started for the warmer lands. They did not know 
the way. They never would have started if they 



ii6 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

had '' reflected " on the difficulties of finding a 
path across fifteen states. They felt the strong 
push of infallible instinct. They obeyed its 
thrust and soon they were swimming on the warm 
waters of the sunny Florida lakes ! 

** The centipede was happy, quite, 

Until the toad for fun 

Said, ' pray, which leg comes after which ? ' 

This worked her mind to such a pitch 

She lay distracted in a ditch, 

Considering how to run." 

Zeno of Elis, in the early days of reflection, 
very successfully proved by an irresistible mathe- 
matically-sound argument that it is impossible to 
walk across a room. Diogenes solved the re- 
flective dilemma by getting up and walking. Ever 
since this simple, practical experiment the world 
has cherished the proverb: '^ solvitur ambulando." 

Many problems which reflection has forced 
upon us can be solved by a bold return to concrete 
experience and to spontaneous unanalyzed action, 
such as occurs under sudden inspiration. Adven- 
ture precedes knowledge in the order of our ex- 
perience and a return to adventure often saves 
us from the perplexities into which excessive re- 
flection has brought us. '' To trust the soul's 
invincible surmise " and to go forward, like Abra- 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 117 

ham, even without knowing the way or the coun- 
try at the end of it, is one of the surest methods 
of conquering intellectual difficulties. Donald 
Hankey is emphasizing this aspect of adventure in 
life's highest concerns when he declares that '' Re- 
ligion is betting your life that there is a God '' 
— risking neck and everything else on the high 
faith that *' God will make the heavenly period 
perfect the earthen.'' '' The spiritual life," as 
Professor Coe has somewhere said, ^' is strongest 
when it is most akin to habit and instinct." When 
one takes it apart and looks at it, it is hard to 
get it together again. 

Worship is, I believe, as spontaneous and nat- 
ural a function of the soul as is appreciation of 
love or enjoyment of beauty. It fulfills what play 
and art and music and love attempt. It brings 
joy, fortification and power. Worship is the 
joyous discovery of something very real and very 
near, which meets all the soul's deepest needs and 
which brings a spontaneous dedication of self to 
what seems the Highest. It is creative, refresh- 
ing, vivifying, quickening, dynamic, just because 
it is correspondence with the divine, energizing, 
recreative Spirit. William James is undoubtedly 
right when he says that prayerful communion '' ac- 
tually exerts an influence, raises our center of en- 



ii8 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

ergy and produces effects not attainable in other 
ways.'' 

Our main question, of course, is how to keep 
the way open and previous to this immense re- 
source. So long as religious faith is alive, ex- 
pectant and unopposed by intellectual inhibitions, 
times of worship are times of great joy. It is 
an experience which brings enlargement of life, 
spaciousness of mind, new dimension to the soul, 
a sense of breaking through the limits and of 
finding room for the soul ; what a friend of mine 
has called ^' a hole in the sky." Times of com- 
munion with God are times when life comes to its 
full bloom and flower. Worship is the very crown 
of life. It is attainment. The soul for the 
moment has arrived. It has found the Kingdom 
of God. But our main problem here is with 
the intellectual inhibitions which blight or kill 
faith and so damp worship and make the way im- 
pervious to these great resources of the soul. 

Long ago St. Augustine said: '' One journey- 
eth to God not in ships, nor in chariots, nor on 
foot; for to journey thither to God, nay even 
to arrive there, is nothing else but to will to go ! " 
If that is so the difficulty is with the will. But we 
now know that ** willing " means the dominating 
prevalence of a live idea, its power to command 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 119 

attention, its impulsion and coerciveness in the oc- 
cupancy of the focus of consciousness. Let the 
thought of God as a personal presence once fill 
the mind with its warmth and intimacy of reality, 
let no rival ideas disintegrate this faith, this reign- 
ing system in consciousness, and worship, with all 
its constructive results, follows, as action follows 
any idea which dominates the focus of conscious- 
ness. W^orship fails, however, as soon as the 
thought of God ceases to be a live, dynamic idea, 
as soon as the reality of a personal God in relation 
with our personal selves loses its power to com- 
mand attention — ceases to make the will propul- 
sive. We cannot live constructively toward any 
goal of life until we can make that goal seem real, 
vital and important to ourselves. 

In this particular field, the field of worship, 
we inhibit our spontaneous instinctive tendencies 
to seek communion and fellowship with God by 
taking up reflective, intellectual theories of the 
universe, or of God, or of self, which banish God 
and make him unreal, remote, — no longer a 
live dynamic idea in consciousness. The fetters 
of the intellect become as strong as adamant, 
and as a consequence worship becomes difficult. 
These intellectual inhibitions are of many sorts 
and varieties, but in the main they come as by- 



I20 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

products of scientific conclusions or of inadequate 
epistemology, i. e., hampering theories of knowl- 
edge. 

Science deals with the universe as though it 
were a complete, self-sufficient reality by itself. 
Cut apart from mind and reduced as it is to exact 
description and causal explanation it offers no 
scope for free events and it reveals no doors 
through which God could come into this world of 
law and mathematical order. Psychology, too, 
brings no relief. It studies the mind as a con- 
geries of describable states and as completely a 
causal system as is the external world. Made 
rigidly scientific it leaves scope for no realities 
that are essential to the spiritual life of man. 

Much of the current psychology tends to carry 
the limitation of knowledge still farther. Mind, 
according to this scientific theory, is nothing but 
an empirical product of natural process and is 
merely an efficient organ slowly evolved for re- 
cording sense-experience and arranging for im- 
mediate or remote behavior. We have no way of 
finding God — we are products of the earth's 
crust. The most we can do is to fool ourselves 
with a subjective idea of our own make! The 
fundamental mistake of all this pseudo-knowledge 
consists in supposing that the world which science 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 121 

gives us is the actual concrete world, or that 
the mind which psychology describes is ever our 
concrete, active, inner life with its riches of ex- 
perience, its creative power, and its deeps and 
heights, which no scientific category can handle. 
Science gives us in both these fields, as it must 
give us, an immensely reduced and transformed 
reality, fitted to categories of description, with 
all aspects omitted which cannot be dealt with in 
exact, ordered and universal ways. But the grav- 
est difficulty comes ( i ) from the tendency to 
treat the fragment of a world cut apart from 
mind, reduced to mechanism, a world of causal 
equations, as though it were a complete whole; 
or again (2) the tendency to set up an abstract 
ego, '^ alone with its states," sundered from ac- 
tive commerce with the environment in which it 
lives, as though this psychic abstraction were the 
reality of the soul. 

Nature in all these schemes is treated as though 
it were a complete system in itself which man 
views as a spectator ab extra. This course in- 
volves a fundamental fallacy — it produces a 
world as unreal as the '' grin without a face " 
which Alice saw in Wonderland! It is like a 
convex side of a curve without any concave side! 

The most important step back into life and Into 



122 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 

faith and into living worship is the recovery or 
discovery of a spiritual conception of the universe. 
The way out is not by an attack on science or by 
a revolt from it, but by seeing that the real world 
in which we live is vastly more than the mechanism 
of matter and motion that submits to science. 
The real world is essentially organic with mind 
and mind with it, completing itself in man and 
revealing its significance through him. The only 
world we know concretely is this rich world of 
life and purpose and beauty and truth which is 
always a mutual fit with our minds and through 
the Inter-relation of which both are revealed. 
There is thus no world sundered from mind and 
there is no mind that is not bound up with a world 
in the heart of which our consciousness is set. 
Well, this mind of ours with its inherent relations 
to the universe of nature, with its creative appre- 
ciation of beauty, sublimity and purpose, with its 
capacity to transcend the factual, and to live for 
what ought to be, with its sense of imperfection 
and its intimations of eternity, is not the abstract 
psyche which we study in psychology — I.e., a 
mere collection of states. Each finite self always 
involves and manifests an Immanent principle 
which transcends the finite. We are plainly over- 
finite as we are over-individual. We each pre- 



Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 123 

sent a unique focalization of a spiritual world, 
and something of the larger whole is revealed in 
the individual part, but full divine reality is ade- 
quately revealed only in the complete organic 
whole. '* The open secret of the universe," as 
Professor Pringle-Pattison has recently said, *' is 
a God who lives in the perpetual giving of him- 
self, who shares the life of his finite creatures, 
bearing in and with them the whole burden of 
their finitude, their sinful wanderings and sorrows 
and the suffering without which they cannot be 
made perfect." In our highest moments we feel 
the significance of the whole organic reality, and 
we come into some sort of contact-relation with 
the Spirit of the whole, and we feel then as a child 
lost in a crowd feels when it finds its father. Un- 
til we have fathomed the deeps of the soul, then, 
have tracked its origin to this evolving dust-wreath 
of matter, have '' proved " that it is only an em- 
pirical aggregation of states, with no power on its 
own acts or on the world and possessed of no in- 
ner way to God, we may well go on worshiping 
and drawing upon sources of spiritual life. 



CHAPTER VII 

CHRIST^S INNER WAY TO THE 
KINGDOM 



" FROM ABOVE " 

It is a favorite idea of the author of the Fourth 
Gospel and the first epistle of John that one does 
not come into full possession of himself nor par- 
ticipate in an adequate way in the life of the king- 
dom of God until he has been '' twice born." 
In the famous Nicodemus passage (John III. 3), 
which has figured more prominently in theology 
than almost any other passage ever written, the 
essential word is extremely difficult to translate. 
It is avioOev^ which may mean " again," *' anew," 
or it may mean '' from above." The context 
would imply the meaning to be " again " or 
" anew," but throughout the first epistle by the 
same author the recurrent phrase is '* born of 
God," i. e., born from above the natural order. 
In John 1. 13 ^' the children of God" are de- 

124 



Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 125 

scribed as persons who are ** born not of blood nor 
of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of men, 
but of God," i. e., they are not merely natural, 
empirical beings, they participate in a higher order 
of life; they are born from above. This writer, 
in every part of his interpretation of spiritual, or 
eternal life, takes it as settled that something from 
beyond the man himself, as an addition of grace, 
must '* come " or be '^ received," before one can 
attain the type and quality of life which Christ has 
inaugurated. 

It is plain, without the suggestion of any theo- 
logical theory, that the bundle of egoistical In- 
stincts and passions with which the once-born child 
is furnished when he arrives does not '' fit " him 
for the kingdom of God, if the kingdom is to be 
thought of as a cooperative social group-life, of 
mutual interrelated service, whose spring and mo- 
tive and power are love. That kind of world 
is not built out of beings who live by self-seeking, 
or self-regarding, impulses. From somewhere 
something '* new " must come into play, something 
'' higher " than ego-forces must emerge, if a 
'' kingdom " is ever even to dawn. We must ad- 
mit that something higher than these self-regard- 
ing impulses does '' emerge " in the growing 
child. He begins at an early date in his unfolding 



126 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 

life — long before he is consciously religious ■ — 
to reveal a capacity for love and to show signs of 
self-forgetfulness, of restraint and sacrifice, and 
of love, at least en crepuscule. And as life goes 
on unfolding in relationship with others, the signs 
of '' other-regarding " interests and sympathies 
multiply. There is an immense amount of unself- 
ishness in this human world of ours; and with 
all its evils, its positive sin, and Its depravity, there 
is much that is sublime and glorified with love 
and tenderness. Where do these '' higher " traits 
come from? Are they "natural" or are they 
'' from above " and " of God " ? 

In asking this question in that form of hard 
and fast dilemma, we are making the answer to 
it more difficult than we need to make it. This 
is one of those situations in which instead of choos- 
ing '* either — or,'' we may take " both." There 
is surely something " natural " about the highest 
spiritual life and there is also something transcen- 
dent about it, something " from above," something 
'* of God," something which is most properly 
called ** grace." First let us consider the natural 
aspect. In the synoptic gospels Christ with the 
utmost simplicity speaks of the life of the king- 
dom as though it were as natural as breathing. 
He calls his followers to live free, easy, natural. 



Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 127 

spontaneous, undisturbed lives, like that of the 
lily or the bird, each of which corresponds, with- 
out strain or effort, with its true environment and 
so grows by normal, natural increments into full- 
ness of beauty and completeness of function. He 
says that the little child, uncalculating, trustful, 
and natural, is the consummate type of the king- 
dom, and that without this likeness no one can ever 
be in the kingdom. He puts the emphasis con- 
stantly on the part which the will plays in human 
salvation. When asked if many are saved, his 
significant answer is, '* Strive to enter in." He 
keeps saying that in the spiritual sphere one gets 
what he persistently seeks and knocks for and 
asks for. The eager, determined, importunate 
will to have the highest is a main factor in achiev- 
ing it. The parable of the talents, again, brings 
out forcibly the value of cultivating, occupying, 
expanding one's native capacities. Nothing is 
more amazing in the immortal story of the prodi- 
gal than the simple statement that he came to 
himself and said, '* I will arise and go to my fa- 
ther," as though it were the most natural thing 
to do. All the beatitudes attach to elemental, 
common, familiar traits of human nature. There 
is in the highest beatitude no leap from this world 
to some other world. Each of them starts with 



128 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 

an every-day quality of life. We do not need to 
wait for new heavens and a new earth before we 
begin to aspire after righteousness, or before we 
have a sense of poverty and failure and humility, 
or before we practice the ministry of peace and 
reconciliation. His fine figure from an older 
prophet, " A bruised reed will he not break, and 
a feebly burning wick he will not snuff out," seems 
to mean that nothing in our human lives is so 
small, or weak, or insignificant that he despairs 
of it, nothing but can be made a channel of use 
and power. 

But all the time we have been calling these 
traits and qualities '' natural '' we have been smug- 
gling in and implying the presence and influence of 
something which can never be explained or defined 
or accounted for in terms of matter, or in terms of 
purely natural, causal sequences, such as mathe- 
matical science deals with. Wherever unselfish, 
uncalculating love is in evidence, something from 
above has come in, something of God is there. 
Wherever ideals operate in a life and control 
lower instincts and carry the will straight against 
a course of least resistance, something not of the 
naturalistic order is revealed. Aristotle long ago 
insisted that the higher stages of thought and of 
the spiritual life cannot be explained OvpaOev — 



Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 129 

i. e., by outside forces, or by naturalistic processes. 
They must have their source and origin in spirit 
and not in matter. And psychology to-day, if it 
were frank, would confess that brain-currents and 
molecular vibrations give no explanation of mental 
processes and give no clew to the real facts that 
concern us. In the last resort there is no explana- 
tion of any spiritual trait except in the light of 
spirit and in terms of spiritual influence. If some- 
thing divine appears in the unfolding life of a child 
it is because '^ something from above," '' some- 
thing of God," has come, however silently and un- 
consciously it may have come. 

Once we supposed that God and man were 
sundered and separated by a wide chasm — that 
God was ''yonder" and we, alas, "here," in an 
undivine world. On that theory he could reach 
us and assist us only by miraculous intervention. 
On that supposition the natural was set sharply 
against the supernatural, which were insulated 
from one another. The traits of character which 
were mediated to the child through the group-life 
of the family, by imitation and contagion of in- 
fluence, by impartation of ideas and ideals — all 
this was natural. " Grace," which brought salva- 
tion to the child, was wholly '' supernatural." 

It is much truer to hold that God is always here, 



I30 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 

is always imparting '' grace," is always ministering 
spiritual assistance to our lives, even in the most 
normal processes of it and where we built no altar 
to commemorate his presence. And where any 
soul reveals unconsciously the marks of grace, or 
has crossed the great divide without knowing it, or 
bears a shining face and wists not of it, there God 
has been working and something from above is 
present. 

But there is still something more to say. There 
is another way to cross the great divide. Some 
cross it and know that they are crossing it. 
Some receive grace and recognize it as grace. 
Some feel invasions, are aware of a higher life 
which floods into themselves from beyond the mar- 
gins of their personal area. They find themselves 
met and challenged by a voice not of their own 
lips. They are called out, as surely as the net- 
menders were, to follow the Christ whose love 
reaches them as a present fact. They seem to 
pass, by his help, from death to life, from dark- 
ness to light. Everything alters, the whole 
world seems changed and made new. They 
enter a new stage of existence and they seem to 
have emerged by a new birth into a higher way 
of living. Something of God, something from 
above, seems to have been added to their natural 



Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 131 

self — and so, indeed, it has been. These are 
consciously *' twice-born " souls. Are they of a 
higher spiritual order than the souls who cross the 
great divide and do not know it? Not necessarily 
so. They are probably more intense, more dy- 
namic, more convicting in their influence • — but 
not more completely saved and not, I surmise, any 
more precious to the heavenly Father. Any way 
that makes a soul Christlike, Godlike, is a good 
way, and therefore is orthodox. Some souls leap 
from one level of life to another; others go the 
slow, spiral way up. But none goes from sin to 
glory without God and his grace; and when any- 
one arrives there, with the new name and the 
shining mark on his forehead, he will be met with 
the joyful words: "My son was dead and is 
alive again, he was lost and is found." And that 
is enough. 

II 

LIKE LITTLE CHILDREN 

Christ makes '' becoming like little children " a 
condition of entering the kingdom of God. It is 
certainly a strange and challenging statement. 
He cannot surely mean that a child is better than 
a man, that there is no gain in progress, that we 



132 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 

are nearer the goal of life when we start than 
when we end ! 

It seems fairly clear as a principle that we do 
not increase the worth of life by reverting to its 
beginnings. It is our destiny to go forward, not 
to turn backward. The time-series is not in any 
case reversible. Space can be traversed in either 
direction, but time runs only one way — onward. 
We cannot go back if we would. Few of us, 
however, would go back if we could. We have 
caught the idea that life is a cumulative affair as 
it advances. It gathers up and preserves its 
gains. It grows richer and more expansive as it 
goes on. Not in childhood, surely, is life truly 
revealed. Innocence is not to be compared with 
holiness; negative virtue is far beneath tried and 
tested character which has faced temptation and 
triumphed. We do not expect now to find Edens 
and golden ages by going backward; we seek them 
rather in the future. They are the achievements 
of the race, not the starting-points. We have 
come to see that we cannot get a perfect Church 
and ideal conditions of Christianity by attempts 
to revive or restore primitive, apostolic Christi- 
anity. It cannot be '* restored." We must go 
on and build the ideal Church. We must advance 
and achieve a Christianity which will spiritualize 



Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 133 

the race and be adequate for the needs of human- 
ity. No mere restoration of the Galilean condi- 
tions or the Corinthian type would do it. So, too, 
with our individual life, we cannot save it or make 
it fit for the kingdom by a return to primitive con- 
ditions, by a reversion to innocence, by a process 
of emptying the gains of life. St. Paul is no 
doubt right in declaring with satisfaction and with 
a sense of progress: '^ When I became a man I 
put away childish things." No one can ever miss 
the fact that this great apostle is always pressing 
forward, looking onward, not backward; leveling 
up, not leveling down. 

What, then, do the great words mean, that 
*' becoming like a child " is a condition of fitness 
for the kingdom? In the first place, it must be 
understood that ^' becoming like a child " is very 
different from being a child. We are not asked 
to revert to a past state; we are called upon to 
experience a transformation which proves to be 
a genuine advance. There are certain traits in 
the nature of the child which can be taken up by 
the mature person, reinterpreted through the 
gains of experience, and relived on a far higher 
level than was possible in actual primitive infancy. 
Napoleon, on the island of St. Helena, might have 
become in his spirit like a child, but even so he 



134 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 

would have been vastly different from the inno- 
cent child who grew up on the other island of 
Corsica. Any childlike quality which appears in 
a full-grown person will necessarily be reset and 
transformed because it will be taken up into a 
richer and more expanded consciousness than is 
possible in the mere child. Memory, too, re- 
floods everything with new colors, and no state 
can ever be the same after memory comes that it 
was before it came. 

One of the beautiful things about the little 
child is his simple, natural sense of the reality of 
God. He seems to have a kind of homing in- 
stinct which takes him naturally back to the Fa- 
ther, to the great Spirit from whom he has come. 
It is more than poetry to say that we come '* from 
God who is our home." Child-minded George 
Macdonald has caught and expressed with genu- 
ine insight the child's feeling of wonder, awe, 
mystery, and divine reality : 

" I am a little child and I 

Am Ignorant and weak; 
I gaze into the starry sky 

And then I cannot speak. 
For all behind the starry sky, 

Behind the world so broad ; 
Behind men's hearts and souls doth lie 

The infinite of God.'' 



Ch. VII] CHRIST^S INNER WAY 135 

Some such haunting, enwrapping sense of real- 
ity as that is a normal part of a child's experience. 
He may lose this native trust and confidence when 
reflection crowds out instinct. He may in later 
life learn to question and to doubt, but once his 
'' east window of divine surprise " lay wide open 
toward God. To get that native sense of God 
back again, to feel the joy and wonder of untrou- 
bled, unclouded fellowship with the Great Com- 
panion is a tremendous gain. To stand once 
more at the doorway of the infinite is a heavenly 
experience. It is, however, not a *' return"; it 
is an immense advance, for it glorifies the entire 
content of life and multiplies all the gains of the 
long journey. 

Another beautiful trait of the child is the ab- 
sence of introspection, self-consciousness. He is 
in the hands of larger powers than himself and 
his little aims of life are realized without worry 
or fret. Great instincts, far older than himself, 
carry him forward, he knows not how, to the ends 
which he seeks. To become like a child would be 
to attain the humble accuracy of instinct, to pass 
beyond the stage of fret and worry, of painful 
effort and reflective consciousness, and to reach 
the aims of goodness by a spontaneous, unerring, 
and uncalculating insight of life. The highest 



136 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 

stage of goodness is attained when the trail of the 
self no longer lies over our deeds, when we no 
longer bungle them through self-consciousness, 
when we hit the mark by a kind of second nature 
as unstudied and unconscious as the child's instinct 
is. But this attainment, this formed second na- 
ture, which is as accurate as instinct, can come only 
through process and achievement and effort. It 
is like a little child, but it is an advance, not a 
return. 

Ill 

THE INNER ISSUE IN GETHSEMANE 

The secret of the cross is kept from age to 
age. Sermons are preached on it. Books are 
written about it. The church is built upon it. 
But it remains in good part a mystery still. Its 
meaning baffles us. It has a depth which we can- 
not fathom. Our theologies do not explain it. 
Our religious interpretations do not exhaust it. 
Something always remains over, which we do not 
succeed in putting into words or even into thoughts. 
The cross is our most common religious symbol, 
and yet we do not penetrate very far behind the 
symbol. It has been interpreted more often than 
any other Christian symbol has been, and yet we 



Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 137 

wait for an interpretation which will satisfy us. 

What we really want is the inner meaning. We 
seek for a revelation of what was in Christ's mind 
as he faced the issue and accepted the cross. 
Theories about it often seem artificial and con- 
structed to explain away an intellectual difficulty. 
For him it was a vital fact, not a theory. He 
went forward to the cross because he saw that it 
was necessarily involved in the life which he was 
living. We should need to understand his mind 
and in some measure feel what he felt with that 
pain and stigma and defeat close in front of him 
and with no way around it. 

" Have in you," St. Paul says, " the mind 
which was in Christ Jesus . . . who became 
obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross " 
(Phil. II. 5-8). That ''mind" is exactly what 
we are seeking for. We are trying to catch the 
secret and to find out what was in his mind as 
he prayed in Gethsemane and walked under his 
wooden beams to Calvary and felt the nails pierce 
his flesh. Not a syllable is spoken which under- 
takes to say in plain words for wayfaring men 
what the deep experience meant. But perhaps 
we can come close to the heart of its meaning if we 
try to live our way into the agonizing utterances 
which break out and reveal at least dimly what 



138 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 

he was feeling as he went steadily on with his 
supreme venture of love. 

Mark's wonderful words are most vivid and 
significant: *' And they were on the way, going 
up to Jerusalem; and Jesus was going on before 
them: and they were amazed; and they that fol- 
lowed were afraid" (Mk. X. 32). Here are 
no words from him at all, but something new is 
in his face which all the followers have noted. 
They plainly see that this is not a mere stage in 
an itinerary. It is a crisis in his resolution, a 
turning point in his life. His mind is made up. 
He has counted the cost. Each step forward now 
is toward the cross and he outdistances the scared 
disciples who timidly follow on behind him in 
wonder and immense fear. Later on the way, 
he asks his most intimate and inner circle of 
friends if they can drink his cup and be baptized 
with his baptism. They think they can endure 
it and go through with it, though they evidently 
had only a vague and dim idea what it meant in 
spite of the ominous signs, for they were plainly 
meditating on glory and triumph. He, on the 
other hand, was altogether concerned with the 
supreme law of the spiritual life which his whole 
teaching and practice in Galilee had expressed and 
illustrated: "He that loses his life, the same 



Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 139 

shall save it." '' What shall it profit a man if 
he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? " 
i. e.^ the very thing that makes life life. If thy 
hand or thy eye hinder thee in the pursuit of thy 
spiritual goal, cut the one off and bore the other 
out and fling them away. It is better to enter life 
maimed and mutilated than to be " safe " and 
miss it. '' The Son of man came to minister and 
to give his life for others." At no point did 
Christ reverse popular opinion more completely 
than in his insistence upon self-sacrifice as the 
principle of human redemption, of spiritual deliv- 
erance. It had been assumed too easily that the 
Messiah was to be a world-ruler, a greater David, 
who should break the yoke of the foreign oppres- 
sor by his power and restore the kingdom to 
Israel. All men were looking for a splendid and 
irresistible king of the Jews. The consternation 
of the disciples as the catastrophe came on and 
the jeer of the mob — *' Himself he could not 
save " — reveal clearly how the tide of thought 
was running. 

The issue, then, in the mind of Christ is sharply 
drawn between the popular expectation and the 
fulfillment of the principle of redemption which 
his own life embodied and incarnated. Geth- 
semane is, thus, the scene of the world's greatest 



I40 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 

battle, though it is an inner battle. Two ways 
of life, as different as light and darkness, are here 
in conflict. If Christ shall decide to save him- 
self from his hour, shall choose to escape from 
the agony which attaches to redeeming love and 
shall emerge from his struggles with his de- 
cision made to be the kind of Messiah the people 
want, then divine purpose, eternal love, and spir- 
itual hopes for man will have been defeated. He 
feels that he could call down twelve legions of 
angels to deliver him from the cross, but that 
way of escape would not be victory — it would be 
a new triumph for the forces of evil. And yet the 
bloody sweat, the groans and cries of a soul in 
deepest agony show how real the temptation was, 
how unspeakably hard was the lonely testing. 

On the other side of the issue the case stands 
clear. There was no way to save men from sin 
and selfishness without the appeal of the uttermost 
self-sacrifice, without the boundless cost of un- 
calculating love. The only way to win men, to 
redeem them, to lift them out of the lethargy and 
unconcern of worldliness, or out of the black depth 
of willful sin, is to make them see the tragic cost 
of sin, to create in their souls a passion for God 
and for holiness and purity of life. And only 
one thing will do that for a man — the discovery 



Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 141 

that some one understands him, appreciates his 
condition, feels his defeat and still believes in him, 
suffers with him and loves him, just as though he 
deserved such grace. The way in fact to beget 
love in the soul of a person is to begin by loving 
the person and suffering with him and for him. 

We can almost hear Christ saying in the dark 
of the garden, as he did say in the light of 
Pilate's palace, *' For this cause was I born and 
to this end came I into the world." To turn away 
from that divine mission for any other goal was 
to accomplish defeat both for himself and for 
the race forever. Most like us he seems when 
the torn heart cries: " Let this cup pass, if pos- 
sible." '* Save me from this hour." Most di- 
vine he seems when he calmly says: *' For this 
very cause came I unto this hour." " Thy will be 
done." He emerges from the crisis with the 
cross inevitable but with the victory clearly won. 
As at the beginning, so at the end of his ministry 
he has met the most subtle temptation to take an 
easier way to seeming victory and success, and 
instead he takes the road to Golgotha and risks 
his whole mission on the venture of suffering, 
sacrificial love, freely, uncalculatingly poured out. 

There is one more single moment when the 
strain and agony sweep over him with insuffer- 



142 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 

able, overwhelming power and force from his 
lips the cry of anguish, *' My God, my God, why 
hast Thou forsaken me? " But it is only for a 
moment. The great loving soul immediately 
comes into full possession of itself and of its spir- 
itual resources, and calmly recognizes that love 
abides unsundered and eternal: "Into thy 
hands, O my Father, I commit my spirit." 

Here, then, is love, not that we love him, but 
that he loved us, stood at the most critical parting 
of the ways of life, faced the deepest issues in the 
universe and gave himself in unswerving faith 
that love would conquer. 



CHAPTER VIII 
JESUS CHRIST AND THE INNER LIFE 

I 

IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 

It is a good sign of spiritual progress that our 
generation has become deeply, genuinely inter- 
ested in the interior aspect of religion. We do 
not feel as certain as Christian thinkers in other 
epochs have felt that we can expound the entire 
nature of God and man and the cosmos from texts 
of Scripture. We are not optimistic in our ex- 
pectations that we can explore all regions of the 
universe with our logic and bridge all the dizzy 
chasms of speculation with syllogisms. We mod- 
estly tend to return home and to explore our own 
inner domain. We are eager to discover the pri- 
mary facts of our interior life and to follow out 
the clews and implications of our own indubitable 
experience. The laboratory method has carried 
us so far in other fields and has enabled us to 
speak with such coercive authority that we are 

143 



144 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

naturally ambitious to apply a kindred method to 
religious life, and to find some central truths of 
the soul which can stand all probings and all tests, 
and which carry a similar conviction to that which 
the demonstration of experiment carries. We 
cannot perhaps expect to travel very far yet in 
the religious field with the slower, surer method 
of experiment and experience. We shall hardly 
be able to match with our method of experience 
those daring feats of logic which marked the great 
epochs of theology, but we may nevertheless ac- 
complish a few simple and essential things which 
logic seemed always to miss. Emerson's Fable 
of '' the mountain '' and '' the squirrel " may be 
appropriately applied to stand for grandly-swell- 
ing logic on the one hand and for humble inner 
experience on the other. 

*^ The mountain and the squirrel 

Had a quarrel, 

And the former called the latter ' Little Prig ' ; 

Bun replied, 

* You are doubtless very big ; 

But all sorts of things and weather 

Must be taken in together, 

To make up a year 

And a sphere. 

And I think it no disgrace 

To occupy my place. 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 145 

If Tm not so large as you, 

You are not so small as I, 

And not half so spry. 

I'll not deny you make 

A very pretty squirrel track; 

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; 

If I cannot carry forests on my back, 

Neither can you crack a nut.' " 

The foundation fact for this experimental way 
is the fact of an immediate inward revelation of 
God within the sphere of personal experience. 
The person himself undergoing this experience 
feels as though the Fountain of Life itself had 
somehow burst into the rivulet of his own con- 
sciousness and was flooding him with the elemen- 
tal energies of a world more real than the one 
we see. This experience, which those who have it 
call " the experience of finding God," is extraordi- 
narily dynamic. It is attended by a release of 
energy, by the opening out of new dimensions of 
life, by a greatly heightened elan of joy, by the 
discovery of unusual power to endure hardship 
and suffering, by an increase of insight and wis- 
dom and by a sudden increment of love and grace. 
There is of course no way to appreciate the full 
value of an experience like that except to have it. 
Like the feel of one's own hat on his head, or like 



146 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

the rapture of seeing the Grand Canyon, it cannot 
be completely translated into the categories of 
description or turned into the coinage of com- 
municable thought. As flowers can give poets 
thoughts that do lie too deep for tears, so, too, 
there are events within our own souls that cannot 
be put into the patois of any human speech. And 
yet if these inner events are real and transforming 
we should certainly be able to speak intelligently 
about them as in all ages men have succeeded in 
speaking of love and beauty and other similar 
realities which exist only for appreciative spirits. 
The New Testament which is the supreme source 
for many other aspects of Christianity is also the 
richest source of material for the study of this 
first-hand religion; this religion of the experience 
of God; this religion which is concerned with the 
formation of the inner life. But the religion of 
the New Testament is too rich and many-sided to 
be reduced to one single type. It is profoundly 
inward and mystical, but it is at the same time out- 
reaching and social. It brings enlarged vision 
and it stirs the deepest emotions, but it also moves 
the will to action. It calls all the aspects of per- 
sonality into full function and it is the spiritual 
activity of the whole life of a whole man. 

The gospel of Jesus everywhere puts a very 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 147 

strong emphasis upon '' wholeness of life," as the 
normal result of the attitude of faith. It seems 
certain that this was a prominent note of the primi- 
tive teaching and a positive feature of the early 
Christian experience. '' Art thou desiring to be 
made whole?" can be taken as a fundamental 
question of Christ to men. " Fear not she shall 
be made whole," is addressed not to one solitary 
case of need; it is the message of the gospel to 
everybody. Christ is always concerned to quiet 
strained nerves, to allay fear, to remove preju- 
dice and suspicion, fret and worry, strain and 
anxiety. But he also goes farther. He regards 
health of body and buoyancy of spirit as the true 
normal condition of life, and he called men to a 
way of living which produced these results. 
Pythagoras taught the novel idea, many centuries 
before, that the various elements of the body 
could, through the attitude and disposition of the 
mind, be put into such relation or balance with 
one another that the body in its right form would 
reveal a harmony, like that of the musical scale, 
or even like that of the harmony of the planetary 
spheres. It is from this theory that we get our 
word tonic as that which puts the body into tone, 
or harmony. 

Christ naturally, spontaneously, assumes that 



148 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

men are to live in health and tone and efficient 
power of life. His gospel is in this fundamental 
sense tonic. It aims at nothing less than an inte- 
gral wholeness of life, a harmony of outer and 
inner self, a freedom from all physical hindrances 
except those which are a necessary part of finite 
and limited existence and a complete possession of 
the potential powers of personality. That way 
of living seems to have been the normal course 
with him, and one of the most striking effects of 
his relationship and fellowship with men was 
this fundamental tonic effect upon them. He or- 
ganized their potential powers. He liberated 
the forces of which they had been unconscious. 
He made them whole. He gave them health. 
He actually produced what Clement of Alexan- 
dria, two centuries later, called '' harmonized 
men." 

The more intimately and adequately we study 
the sayings of Jesus and the more deeply we pene- 
trate the heart of his message, the more clearly 
we see that the Kingdom of God which he pro- 
claimed cannot be exhaustively conceived in po- 
litical terms, or social terms, or economic terms, 
or ethical terms, any more than it can be in terms 
of eschatology. The '' sermon on the mount " 
is not truly comprehended when it is called " a 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 149 

new law '' or when it is treated as a collection of 
ethical injunctions. All his sayings can, of 
course, be taken at different levels. It is possible 
to find what look like legalistic commands and to 
pick out words that seem to justify a definite social 
and economic scheme, as it is also possible to sort 
out an eschatological strand. But as soon as one 
begins to sound the real depths of his message 
in sermon or parable or conversation it becomes 
clear and plain that he is dealing primarily with 
those things which lie at the root and basis of 
personal religion, the fundamental disposition of 
the soul, the elemental conditions which have to 
do with the formation of the inner life. No 
change of dynasty, no acts of legislation, no 
scheme for the redistribution of property and in- 
come, no proclamation of social panaceas, no 
translation even from this world to another world, 
can bring the Kingdom of which he persistently 
speaks. It begins, and it must begin, first of all 
as a spirit, as an attitude of soul, as an inner ex- 
perience of God. The Kingdom of God in its 
first intention is a certain kind of Inner life — 
'' the Kingdom of God is within you." It presup- 
poses the recognition of a higher will than our 
own with which we desire to cooperate ; it implies 
the discovery of a spiritual realm of Life which is 



I50 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

engaged to fulfill for us the incompleteness and 
failure of this world where we toil and suffer, and 
it means, too, that we know already enough about 
this higher realm of Life to say, '' Abba," when it 
surges into our souls, and to live in a joyous Fa- 
ther-son relationship to the perfect will of the 
deeper universe. 

Every step and stage of Christ's life, every act 
and declaration of his, gives us the impression 
that he is in personal relationship with this deeper 
universe. It comes out not merely in the synop- 
tics' reports of striking auditions on momentous 
occasions — at the baptism and transfiguration, 
for example — when he seemed to hear the words 
of approval, *' this is my beloved son." It ap- 
pears, again, not merely in that confident convic- 
tion which he felt in Gethsemane that he might, 
If he would, summon twelve legions of angels to 
save himself from his hard path of suffering. 
It is in the very atmosphere and color of the whole 
gospel narrative. His consciousness, so far as we 
can sound it through these wonderful words of 
our accounts, always reveals the Abha-experience^ 
the Father-son relationship. The world in which 
Christ lives is never confined to the hills and sky 
of Palestine, to the walls and streets of Jerusalem, 
to the policies and the armies of the Roman Em- 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 151 

pire — in short, to any aggregations of outward 
and visible realities. His world always includes 
a realm of spiritual facts which are more certain 
than any outward things, and the most certain fact 
of that inward realm is the near access of the 
Father-God who is the source and ground and sub- 
stance of his life. His simplest words are loaded 
with a power of life that comes and can come only 
from experience of God. Everything he says is 
reenforced by the vast background of experience 
out of which it springs. We are moved as we 
listen, not alone by the '' authority " and the 
" grace " of these sayings, but still more by the 
interior depth of the personal life from which the 
words come. His life floods through all his 
words. The energy of his will and his unalter- 
able purpose to stake the inauguration of his 
Kingdom absolutely on the conquering power of 
love and suffering and sacrifice give us an over- 
mastering sense of his inward conjunction with 
the Father who can be revealed only in this love- 
way. His method of prayer as refreshment, re- 
enforcement and vital correspondence, like an 
open window, allows us to form a very clear im- 
pression of that interior fellowship with God upon 
which and by which he lived. Whether the 
prayer-experience is attended by radiations of 



152 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

light, as at the transfiguration, or whether it is 
marked by an agony of bloody sweat as in Geth- 
semane ; in both cases the central fact which breaks 
through is his calm reliance on invisible forces 
and his unfaltering assurance of intercourse and 
communion with One who loves and cares and 
knows and works and whose way of life repro- 
duced in men is the Kingdom of God. 

The Beatitudes of the Gospel furnish us with 
a window, which looks in upon the possible inner 
palace of the soul which Christ means to build 
there. No words were ever simpler than these 
" sayings," and yet no words were ever more pro- 
found and wonderful. This inner palace, like 
Aladdin's, is built out of invisible and viewless 
material. The whole mighty thing consists of 
nothing but qualities of character, attitudes of 
will, traits of disposition, aspirations of heart, the 
set and trend of inner currents. Salvation, in this 
brief account of it, is not thought of as admission 
to some celestial city, or arrival at some peaceful 
Avilion of the soul, 

" Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
Nor ever wind blows loudly.** 

It is rather the formation of an inner self of such 
a sort that blessedness inherently and automati- 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 153 

cally attaches to it. Consciousness of insufficiency 
and need ; childlike dependence on higher wisdom ; 
trust and confidence in the love and power of 
God; willingness to suffer wrong and to endure 
seeming defeat rather than to take short-cuts to 
easy success; the spirit of meekness, patience and 
mercy; hunger and endless aspiration for fullness 
and beauty of life; sensitiveness of heart to the 
environing, invading Life of God, passion of soul 
to share in the service of peace-making love and 
to take up the burden of the world's suffering, and, 
finally, quiet endurance of misunderstanding and 
abuse with unstinted forgiveness of spirit — these 
things form for Christ the stuff and material of 
the life which is of the Kingdom and in the King- 
dom and which has the blessedness of heaven now 
and the potentiality of infinite expansion. 

We do not discover the full richness of the 
inner life as Christ reveals it until we take the 
measure of it in terms of the love which he expects 
of us. " You are to love," he says, ^^ even as I 
have loved you." There are no other words of 
his quite so tremendously costly in their demands 
of consecration upon us as these, and at the same 
time no words which reveal such immense faith in 
the inner possibilities of men like us. We are not 
merely expected to do as we would be done by. 



154 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

However golden that rule of conduct may be, It 
is not the full Christian measure of life. For our 
true way of life we look, not at our own feeble 
imaginings of what we should like done to our- 
selves, we look at this inexhaustible inner wealth 
of sympathy, and insight of understanding, and 
appreciation, and tenderness, and uncalculating 
love and readiness for the uttermost sacrifice to 
make love effective — this is the way, and this is 
the full measure of the length and breadth and 
depth and height. Even this is expected of us. 

One cannot too strongly emphasize the part 
which Jesus assigns in his '* sayings *' to the enef' 
getic will in the formation of the inner life. It is 
the strenuous man, strenuous even as the con- 
queror of cities, who takes the Kingdom by siege. 
The soul can always have what it wants, many 
" sayings '' tell us, but the want must be single, 
unintermittent, unyielding, and washed clean of 
all indecision and wavering. The man who sets 
out on this aim at complete spiritual life, life that 
is perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect, must 
be ready to surrender absolutely everything that 
threatens to hamper him in the pursuit of the 
soul's fixed goal. It cannot be attained on any 
fifty-fifty scheme — half of the life set upon the 
world and half of it focussed on God and the life 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 155 

rich in God. The all must be given for the all. 
There is a fine phrase in the brief account of 
Brother Lawrence, the Flemish quietist of the 
seventeenth century. The passage to which I re- 
fer says that the brotherhood noticed in this sim- 
ple unlearned man '' an extraordinary spacious- 
ness of mind." '' Spaciousness of mind," or what 
William James called " a new dimension of life," 
is one of the most impressive effects produced upon 
the soul by the discovery of Christ. The handi- 
caps and limitations that usually beset fall awj^y, 

" The heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world 
Is lightened/' 

a door in the universe somewhere seems to push 
back, and widen out the area of inner space where 
the soul lives. It is, in some real sense, an ex- 
perience of God and it always brings, when it 
comes, an expansion of joy. Christ's disciples 
obviously had this experience in high degree. It 
is Luke who dwells upon this trait most. For 
him, the gospel is essentially " tidings of great 
joy." All heaven thrills with joy when a lost soul 
is found and restored. It is like the joy of the 
shepherd when he finds his lost sheep, or that of 
a woman when she recovers a coin, lost in the dirt 



156 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

and rubbish of her oriental house, or, better still, 
it is like the triumphant joy of a father's heart 
when a child, lost by his own willful and stupid 
folly, comes to himself, makes the great venture 
of trusting his father's love and comes home. 
The joy, however, is not merely in the heavenly 
region — in the Father's heart — but there is a 
joy and enlargement of soul as well in the one 
who is '' found." He knows that he was '' dead " 
and now he is '' alive again " ! He was " lost " 
and now he is '' found " ! The broken alabaster 
box is the everlasting " memorial " of an inner 
transformation which opens out the sky, and 
makes " new heavens and a new earth " for a poor 
sinner when the love of Christ finds and saves her 
from herself. The tears that washed the blessed 
feet in the home of critical Simon were not tears 
of hard sorrow. They were the flooding forth of 
a new found soul that had burst its iron prison 
and had found the sun and life and love again and 
was saved through the creation of a redeemed 
inner self that delivered her from the old self of 
sin and death. 

Strangest of all, Luke tells us that the disciples, 
after they had seen the visible Christ vanish for- 
ever from their sight, returned from Bethany 
" with great joy." Something had happened to 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 157 

them under that open sky which gave them an 
enlarged spaciousness, a new dimension. They 
had lost, but they had found. Some kind of 
energy to live by had come into them and pos- 
sessed them. Luke's narrative in The Acts con- 
tinues the thrilling story of their liberated and en- 
larged inner life. The great spiritual fact of 
Pentecost was the consciousness, in this little band 
of believers, of the upwelling, inrushing of the di- 
vine Spirit. It was the epoch-moment when the 
first Christian group passed over from a visible 
Master and personal Teacher to an invisible and 
indwelling, but not the less real, Presence. It was 
a transforming event, not so much on account of 
the novel tongue-speaking and the visible phe- 
nomena, as because something dynamic and ex- 
panding came into their souls, as has happened 
many times since in the history of the Church, and 
prepared them for dangers and sufferings and 
labors in the midst of a hard and difficult world. 
They spoke the word now with boldness ; they said 
with faith to the mountain of obstacles in front 
of them, '^ be removed and be cast into the sea,^** 
and it obeyed ; they rose to a miracle-working spiC§ 
itual life and, as always in the power of this en- 
larged area of life, they thrilled with joy, eating 
their meals together in gladness and sharing, with 



158 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

inner happiness, all they had, for the sake of those 
who lacked, while their joy culminated in a simple 
agape, or love-m^al, partaken in the exuberant 
consciousness of fellowship with the living though 
unseen Lord of their lives. 

II 

IN THE Vi^RITINGS OF ST. PAUL 

Still more wonderful was the dynamic effect of 
the discovery of Christ upon the inner life of 
Saul of Tarsus. It is, I think, the top miracle of 
Christian history. It has become almost a mod- 
ern truism that St. Paul's Christianity cannot be 
reduced to a system of theology. The most im- 
portant feature of it is that vital, personal, auto- 
biographic strand of his " gospel," as he calls it, 
which is primarily experience, " knowledge of 
acquaintance '' rather than '' knowledge about.'' 
There are no doctrines in his Epistles which are 
not, first of all, flooded and saturated with a life- 
experience, and therefore nobody ever can under- 
stand this spiritual conqueror of the Roman Em- 
pire who does not succeed in some degree in en- 
tering and appreciating his rich and abundant 
inner life. 

It was St. Paul who first expressed for all Chris- 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 159 

tendom the basic idea of our religion that the Per- 
son who had been for a definite historical period a 
visible, tangible revelation of God in the center of 
the little Galilean group has now become for us 
forever an invisible Life, an immanent Reality, 
the self-giving, endlessly revealing Spirit — " The 
Lord is the Spirit." St. Paul looks to this inward, 
resident Spirit as the supreme dynamic for moral 
and spiritual life. The '' flesh," the stubborn 
hindrance to all goodness, can be conquered, even 
more than conquered, by the power of the Spirit 
of Christ working within the man and forming in 
him the character-fruits of Spirit. " The law of 
sin and death," i. e., the drag and the dominion 
of the sinful nature in us, can be completely 
broken, and full deliverance can be won, through 
inward cooperation with the law of the Spirit of 
Life in Christ Jesus, as a fact within (Rom. VIII. 
2). The central *' mystery" which has been 
brought to light by the gospel is, he insists, the 
'' mystery " of Christ in men — *' Christ in you " 
(Col. I. 27). Life, in the light of this, takes on 
new and wonderful meaning, for it is nothing 
short of re-living Christ — '' for me to live is 
Christ" (Phil. I. 21). 

He has given us in Chapters III-V of 2 Corinth- 
ians an extraordinary interpretation of this " new 



i6o THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

life/' which is a wholly different biological stage 
from that of the '' old life," i. e., the Adam-life. 
He contrasts it first with the life of the old legal, 
or Mosaic, dispensation. That was imposed 
from without upon the person. It always re- 
mained foreign and external to him. The motive 
was fear, fear of consequences, and the most 
which this system could do was to create a con- 
sciousness of failure, a conviction of sin and a 
desperate sense of the need of higher help. The 
glory of the new method, a far excelling glory, is 
this, that now the creative power is a vital, per- 
sonal Spirit working within the believer and trans- 
forming him into a living embodiment and ex- 
pression of the Christ-Life, so that wherever he 
goes he is an epistle of Christ in which everybody 
can read, clearly or dimly, the lines and the char- 
acter of the Christ who is in him. He no longer 
needs to point to an external law as his standard, 
he does not find it necessary to carry a written 
tablet as a passport of his faith. His standard, 
his law, his ideal, his goal of life, is more or less 
revealed in his spirit, in his deeds, in his face, in 
his personality. As William Dell put it in the 
seventeenth century: "The true religion of 
Christ is written in the soul and spirit of man by 
the Spirit of God; and the believer is the only 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE i6i 

book in which God himself writes his New Tes- 
tament." The process of writing '' the epistle of 
Christ," the New Testament in terms of person- 
ality, St. Paul says, is a double process, working 
both outwardly and inwardly. It is a transfor- 
mation, ever increasing in glory and radiance, 
wrought out in the life of man as he lives respon- 
sively in the contagious presence of Christ, with / 
all veils of prejudice lifted from the soul and with 
all the wrappings of contracting custom removed. 
The power of unconscious imitation changes, we 
know, even the animal into visible likeness to its 
environment. It transmits into the inner life of 
the mobile child the emotions and ideas, the 
speech and the manners of the family-group. It 
changes, too, St. Paul says, the beholder of Christ 
into the same image as that which he beholds, 
from glory to glory, while the Spirit of Christ 
working invisibly within pushes like a mighty tidal 
force toward the same end — '* that Christ may be 
made manifest in our mortal bodies." In fact, by 
this process of the Spirit an inner man is built up 
which can not only stand the afflictions and tribu- 
lations of this present time, but can even defy 
death itself. In some way, perhaps no more 
mysterious than any other process of life, a per- 
manent inside self — an inner man — is being 



i62 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

woven by the Spirit which will abide when the 
tent of the body falls away and dissolves — a cov- 
ering so that the soul will not be '' naked," a house 
of God not made with hands, but made of the in- 
corruptible, indissoluble material of the heavenly 
realms of Spirit; and thus death becomes the com- 
plete liberation of our personal selves into real 
life — '* mortality is swallowed up into life." 

Now all this truth of Christianity which I have 
sketched as briefly and compactly as possible, rests 
for St. Paul, not upon the testimony of books, not 
upon the transmitted tradition of the primitive 
Galilean group. " I did not receive it," he de- 
clares, '* from men," '' neither was I taught it " 
(Gal. I. 12). It came to him as ''revelation." 
It was a thing primarily of experience. His en- 
tire eternal hope rests upon '' the earnest, or fore- 
taste, of the Spirit " ( 2 Cor. V. 5 ) . 

The Stoic conception of God as Soul or Spirit 
of the Universe may unconsciously have influenced 
him. So, too, the experiences and practices of 
the mystery-religions may have had their sugges- 
tive influence upon him. But after all, the thing 
that counted most was his own undoubted personal 
experience of the invasion of God, the insurging 
of a divine Spirit which he identified with that 
Life that was personalized in Jesus Christ. 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 163 

*' God who said let there be light," he tells us, in 
his personal account of the *' new creation," " has 
shined into our hearts to give the light of the 
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
Jesus Christ " (2 Cor. IV. 6) ; or, again, '* It is 
no longer / that live but Christ liveth in me " 
(Gal. II. 20). 

His whole system of ethical life grows out of 
the *' new creation," produced within by the Spirit 
of Christ in the inner man. Evil is to be over- 
come by the inner forces of a triumphant good- 
ness (Rom. XII. 21). Love, as the highest 
''gift," is formed within by the work of the Spirit 
and becomes the creative power not only of a new 
individual but of a new society as well. It over- 
tops tongues and miracles, it surpasses prophecy 
and mysteries, it outdistances even faith and 
knowledge. It is the very inner substance of 
*' the new world " which Christ is building out of 
men. Being rooted and grounded in love. Chris- 
tian believers can comprehend together the 
breadth and length and depth and height and 
know the love of Christ which passes knowledge 
and be filled with all the fullness of God ( i Cor. 
Xm. andEph. IV. 17-19). 

It is, again, with St. Paul as with the Galilean 
group, an experience which brings expansion in 



i64 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

every direction. The spaciousness of mind which 
came to this tent-maker, when Christ came into 
him, has no adequate parallel. His soul burst 
out into new dimensions. He lived ever after 
under a vastly opened sky. He became so tri- 
umphantly radiant and joyous that neither beasts 
at Ephesus nor Judaizers in Jerusalem nor dun- 
geons in Nero's Rome could hide the rainbow 
which overarched his life. '' I can do all things 
through Christ, my strengthener "(Phil. IV. 13). 
" God always causeth us to triumph In Christ " 
(2 Cor. IT. 14). '* Rejoice always and again re- 
joice " (Phil. IV. 4). '' All things work together 
toward good," and '' The whole creation is wait- 
ing for the unveiling of sons of God" (Rom. 
VIII. 19 and 28). This is Paul's iEgean gos- 
pel, the gospel as it was interpreted in the cities 
around the shores of the iEgean Sea, and finally, 
a half century later, this truth was raised to its 
full glory in the fourth Gospel, which is also 
^gean. It is once more»the gospel of the Spirit. 

Ill 

IN THE WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN 

This gospel, like that of Paul's, rests upon the 
central faith that God is an essentially self-reveal- 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 165 

ing Being, flooding out as Light, coming into per- 
sonal relation with us as Spirit, bringing into play- 
new vital forces as Life and offering us the su- 
preme moral dynamic as Love. Here in this cul- 
minating message of the New Testament the en- 
tire purpose of the incarnation is thought of as 
increase and expansion of Life: '* I am come 
that men might have life and have it in abundant 
measure" (John X. 10). Here the synoptic 
concept of the Kingdom gives place to a new goal 
of life — a kind of life in its nature inexhaustible, 
divine in its origin and endlessly expansive in its 
possibilities. This is now called eternal life. It 
does not refer to a far away place or to a remote 
age. It is a quality of life beginning here and 
now, a way of living for any world. It comes 
into the soul from above. It is '' of God." It 
has a divine origin. It is like another '' birth " 
that inaugurates life on a totally new level, as dif- 
ferent from Adam-life as that is from plant life. 
But it forever attaches to the soul's response to 
Christ. ^ It is bound up with the attitude of faith: 
'' As many as received him to them gave he 
power to become sons of God, even to them that 
believe on his name " (John I. 12). 

This, again, is not theory; it is not theology. 
It is experience. Whoever ^' John " was — and 



i66 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

I presume we shall never solve the mystery — he 
had seen with his eyes, had heard with his ears, 
and had handled with his hands the Word of Life. 
Either outwardly or inwardly he had lain '' breast 
to breast with God." '' Of his fullness '' he had 
'' received '' and *' grace upon grace." His own 
life had '^ received " incomes from beyond the 
margin of himself and had leaped to the new level. 
Eternal life was already a fact and no more 
needed proving than the iEgean sunshine did. 
'' He that believeth is already begotten of God." 
'' Faith is the victory." '' He that believeth hath 
eternal life." '* He that believeth hath the wit- 
ness in himself." 

Salvation, in the Johannine interpretation, is 
the realization of a divine-human life. '' To be 
saved " means '* to be of God." It is not merely 
a heightened natural life; not a life that has be- 
come refined and improved by the weeding away 
of the coarse and gross qualities. It is rather 
conceived as an inward, spiritual process, moving 
in two directions; God imparting himself, and 
man appropriating him. The discovery of God, 
or better our consciousness that he has come to us 
and is giving his life to us, is our opportunity of 
" birth," and the conscious opening of our life 
to his life is the birth. In a natural birth there 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 167 

is no choosing, no willing. We are pushed into 
life. But no spiritual step can be of that sort. 
A spiritual '' birth " involves a choice. There 
must be a voluntary opening of the life to God. 
The human self does not and cannot realize all it 
means. He knows at the moment of his birth- 
choice hardly more of the potential riches of the 
spiritual life in God than' the new-born child knows 
of the significance and depth of mother-love when 
he smiles his first smile back in response to her 
joyous face bent over him. But both have passed 
a crisis in which there has been the hatching of 
a new self, capable now of unlimited expansion. 
It would be impossible from the nature of the case, 
to describe the '' birth from above," for it is not 
a describable event. No free choice in a human 
life can be described. The things that can be 
described belong to an organized natural system, 
and we need not look there for the free or the 
spiritual. They simply cannot be there. They 
are '' events " that can be known only as inward, 
private experiences, to be told only in symbol, 
or suggested in typical language. '' The wind 
bloweth where it listeth," '' so is every one born 
of the Spirit." This symbol of the wind is sig- 
nificant, for the wind is peculiarly that which is 
free and indescribable, and when the words were 



i68 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

used the wind was supposed to be of all physical 
things most free and unpredictable. 

His own figure of '' the Door " is doubly sig- 
nificant. It is a door that swings both ways. 
Through It God comes to men; through it 
men go to God. John's *' Way " to the divine 
life, his method of a divine-human life, cannot be 
clearly grasped unless we first realize that for 
him Christ is God humanly manifested, a Person 
in whom Divine Life expressed itself. Christ 
makes real the supreme fact that Divinity and 
humanity belong together, and he shows them 
together, not in a '' double personality " but in a 
single harmonious self-conscious life. The ques- 
tion of human salvation on this level is merely 
the question of partaking of Christ and so of 
God. There is manifestly a *' divine giving," 
but there can be no effectual salvation, no spir- 
itually new nature until there is a " human tak- 
ing." It involves no loss of personality, no aban- 
donment of selfhood; that is to say, the self is not 
merged into a nameless absolute, '' fusing all the 
skirts of self," nor does a foreign will invade one's 
domain of inner life. Personality remains, but it 
is a personality conscious of its divine environ- 
ment, conscious that its life is in God, and a per- 
sonality that chooses to will the divine will. It 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 169 

Is as though there were a conscious Ocean witK 
conscious inlets opening out of it. The inlet may 
have its defined self-life, but it may open its sea- 
side to the Ocean with its infinite currents. The 
fresh water of the land may flow out toward the 
deep sea and the tides of a measureless water may 
sweep in to sweeten this shallow inlet. The inlet 
is in the Ocean and the Ocean is in the inlet ! But 
one is blundering when he attempts to illustrate 
by physical things a spiritual condition. It can 
be done only in parabolic fashion so that a spir- 
itual insight catches the suggestion. 

This method has been followed, in a most pro- 
found way. In the Vine-passage (John XV. i-io) . 
The Illustration points first of all to a necessity 
for a vital relationship between Christ and the 
individual. The branch Is a branch only because 
it Is in the vine. It Is not merely In a close ap- 
proximation to the vine-stock. Its life is in the 
vine. It shares the vine-life. They are, in short, 
not two things but one. The vine Is a vine be- 
cause it has branches, and the branches are 
branches because they are In a vine. The same 
sap is in them all. Their life is a common life. 
Branch and vine are organic to each other. In- 
corporation Is here made the condition of spiritual 
living, and the condition as well of the manifesta- 



I70 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

tion of the fruits of the spiritual life. But the 
figure carries us far beyond the mere fact of a 
vital union between solitary individuals and the 
Divine Life-source. It takes us over into an or- 
ganic spiritual society, which is the ultimate goal 
of the divine-human life both for Paul and John. 
This organic society is implicated in the very na- 
ture of the spiritual life as it is presented in the 
Fourth Gospel. It is a life of giving and receiv- 
ing, a life of inter-relation, a life of incorporation, 
so that finally the believer partakes of God and 
is himself in God. But the moment there are two 
such believers the two lives have immediate spir- 
itual relationship; they are two branches in the 
same vine. We slide, in the original narrative, 
almost unconsciously out of the figurative lan- 
guage into the direct '' commandment," ** that ye 
love one another as I have loved you." Love 
here and everywhere is the realized union of spir- 
itual beings in an organic society. The two com- 
mandments are after all only one: *' abide in 
Christ," and " love." By doing either, one does 
both. 

But the very heart of the teaching on the divine- 
human organic society is reached in Christ's 
prayer (John XVII). One may note how far 
he has traveled beyond the selfish and competitive 



Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 171 

basis of human society in the words : '' all mine 
are thine, and thine are mine " (vs. 10) . But the 
sacred refrain of the prayer is, '' that they all may 
be one/' The oneness here sought is made defi- 
nite in character by the words, *' even as we are 
one/' There could be no more definite statement 
than this that Christ, as John reports him, out- 
lines for his followers a divine-human life like his 
own. ''I in them, thou in me'' — that is the 
ultimate spiritual attainment for an individual; 
but the prayer draws the wider results which, from 
the nature of the case, flow out of such an attain- 
ment, viz., ** that they may be made perfect in 
one " (vs. 23) . This is the Divine event to which 
the entire Christ-revelation moves. 

Dante, at the summit of his celestial journey, 
sees the saints of all centuries, as the petals of a 
mighty rose, forming one consummate flower with 
God himself for center. Nothing could better 
express the truth of the cooperative, organic spir- 
itual life. It is union of differentiated selves, and 
a differentiation in realized unity, and it is a union 
which is formed by a divine life-relationship — 
'* I in them; thou in me; one in us." 

This chapter deals only with one short period 
of Christian life. If it were possible to review 
other periods of high-tide experience, we should 



172 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 

find similar results — expansion of personality, re- 
lease of energy, heightened joy, increased spa- 
ciousness of mind, intensified love and new march- 
ing power. It turns out always that inner life 
cannot be severed from outer life. There can be 
no great interior life, with its deeps and heights, 
without a losing of self in the tasks of a needy 
human world, and there can be no great human 
service which does not flow out of an inner life 
that has Alpine heights and deeps to it. Christ 
ministers to both the outer and the inner, because 
he is King of a Kingdom in which both the indi- 
vidual and the social group are essential elements 
and without the perfection of both factors neither 
one can reach its goal. 

It is profoundly true, as the aged Simeon finely 
foresaw, that in him *^ the thoughts of many 
hearts " have been revealed. He of a truth 
knew what was in man! He opens our inner 
lives and discovers them to ourselves, and he is 
the dynamic through which we can become an ef- 
fective creative force in the making of the world 
that is to be. 



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